Tab control with no visible tabs

20 Comments

• Why did he want to use the TabControl instead of Panels or ...? Was it Tai?
  
  

• Because stacking Panel controls on top of each other makes for an ugly design-time experience (and yes, it was Tai).
  

• Ah. I can appreciate that.
  

• What fun - playing "guess the developer who asked the question". Kevin - can you provide more example questions? Then we can try to guess who asked it :) :).
  

• Now if only we could have the Wizard 97 option. Why was that never implemented in .NET even though it's in the Win32 API?
  

• uh... and tabcontrol1.visible = false was too hard to implement?
  

• Bob,
  I think you missed the idea - show the tab control and tab contents, but without showing the tab headers.
  

• thanks man, that working! this is a really good way to avoid switch between two panel in the same range.
  

• Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for.
  

• You are so smart! thanks
  

• it doesn't work! (border is still visible)
  

• you are simply great!!
  This is what i was looking for
  

• Thanks for the hint. It's work perfectly!
  

• Great, thank you very much, made my life much easier!! :)
  

• thanks, it's work great!
  

• This is also what I do for make an easy swap between group of controls.
  The problem is the borders of tabcontrol.
  But your solution don't works.
  I use VS 2008 and VB.NET, or C#.
  Sorry.
  

• Thanks, a perfect way to create a wizard.
  
  Those who say it doesn't work might try actually RUNNING the program, if the tabs would be invisible at design time it would be a tad harder to change to another one :)
  
  I had constructed another approach already that also worked, but it required a bit more code: put a panel on each tab, keep the tab control invisible at runtime. When a page has to be shown, set the parent of the corresponding panel to the form (after setting the parent of the current page back to be its tabpage) and voila - the panel's contents magically appear.
  
  Something a bit like this:
  
  me.suspendlayout()
  if CurrentPage isnot nothing then
  CurrentPage.parent = TabPage1
  end if
  Panel2.parent=Me
  CurrentPage = Panel2
  me.resumelayout()
  
  (Suspend/ResumeLayout speeds up switching and avoids flicker on complex pages).
  

• Thanks for your share.
  

• Any way to switch tabPage in the designer without the tabs visible then?
  

• You can set ItemSize to something bigger than (0,1) at design time, but change it to (0,1) in the Form.Load event. This way they will stay visible at design time.