Tab and TabStrip Control

When you need to organize lot of information on a single screen, tab control is must have tool. Especially when it has 9 different styles and full Windows XP theme support.

TabStrip control provides you with just a tab portion of the controls and you can assign the controls directly to tabs and tab strip control will show/hide them automatically as you change selected tab. Of course you can still do all the work manually.

One of the great features of TabStrip control is the automatic MDI support. It helps you with presentation of your MDI Child forms and it automatically creates and removes the tabs as you add and remove MDI Child forms. Using it is extremely simple, set MdiTabbedDocuments property to true and make sure that you assign the MdiForm property in your form's load event. That's all you need to do.

TabLayoutType property gives you full control of tab layout. Fit container will make sure that your tabs do not scroll, Fixed width with navigation box, Multi-line with navigation box and Multi-line with no navigation box are available layout types.

Style property controls the appearance of tab control and ThemeAware property indicates to use Windows XP themes when available instead of the Style you set. That way if your application is running on the operating system that does not support themes, like Windows 2000, you can specify which style to use instead of the theme style. Below are samples of all styles available with tab and tab strip control.