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Planning Form Layout in VB.NET
Benny Mathew is the Founder, CEO of Seamless Integration Solutions Pvt. Ltd. He has 10+ years of formal experience in the IT industry and has provided services to many of the well known multi-natio...
- Introduction
- Getting Started
- Building the form
- The problem
- The solution
Getting Started
Let's delve in and find out. We will start out by designing the user interface shown below of my new experimental application -'An expense tracker'. (My 'Guinea pig' to learn dot net technology)
Now when it came to resizing controls first I started experimenting with the anchor and dock properties, but what the hell? Controls would either overlap or move away to opposite extremes of the form, or get jumbled up. Tried all possible stunts to no avail. If you set the anchor property, the dock property would vanish and vice versa. The controls never seemed to care about each other; all that they were concerned was either to stick to an edge of the form or to maintain a constant distance from the edges of the form.
During this process, I observed that there were controls, which could be grouped together, which needed to resize in the same way. This observation finally led me to the idea of using panels to group those controls, and did need to use a little code to get the desired effect. :(
But here is the good news; it is definitely a lot easier than resizing controls in VB6. I still got away writing just a couple of lines of code.
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It is difficult to design fairly complicated forms by simply using anchors and docks. .Net provides two layout manager Flow layout panel and Table Layout Panel. However you need to use a good layout manager for professional form designing, e.g. SmartLayouts .
I would use 4 panels in the following way:
1) one up (this is the extra panel that is not in your example). Set the Dock property to this one to Top and set the Height to whatever you want.
2) The Green panel will be inside the panel one. Set the Dock property to Left and set the Width to whatever you want
3) The Bleu panel also inside the panel one. Set the Dock property to Fill.
4) The fourth panel (the Red one) comes bottom (as child of the form) with Dock set to Fill. (this is also a difference to your example)
The rest of the things are the same.
What we have accomplished with the fourth panel ? The fact that the Height of the Blue/Green panels is fixed to the height of the Panel One, so no coding is necessary to keep the height fix.
The only problem left is that the Width of the Green panel is fixed and when the form is made wider it does not resize. So the only code necesary is to make the
Green panel wider according with the width of the form.
Best regards,
Dan
good work - and helpful!
Good one ! Keep it up ...
This is very very very nice
[6]keep it up[/6]
good work
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