.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Chapter 4. Menus and Toolbars

Menus are often the only practical way to present a rich array of functionality without cluttering up the user interface. Whether appearing at the top of the window, or as a context menu accessed through the righthand mouse button, menus allow an application to show concisely which operations are available. An application’s usability can be further enhanced by making the most important operations available through toolbar buttons as well as menus.

The Windows Forms framework provides support for both menus and toolbars. Despite the fact that these two technologies serve similar roles—toolbar buttons often correspond directly to menu items—they are presented through two largely unrelated parts of the class library. However, as we will see later, it is possible to unify the way you handle events from them in your application.

In this chapter, we will first examine the support for menus. Then we will see how to create toolbars. Finally, we will see how events from both can be dealt with by a single set of event handlers.

Menus

The Windows Forms framework provides support for adding menus to your applications. It uses a single programming model both for normal window menus and for context menus. The model allows menus to be modified dynamically, or even combined, providing flexibility at runtime, and supports the ability to reuse and extend menu definitions.

We will start by examining the object model used for constructing menus. Then we will see how to attach ...