.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Toolbars

Toolbars usually provide access to features that are also accessible through menus, but there’s a tradeoff. Because a toolbar is always visible, it can be clicked without having to navigate through a menu structure, but toolbars have a slightly higher learning curve, because items are normally represented by buttons with a small bitmap; it is much harder to represent an operation unambiguously with a tiny picture than it is to describe it with some text in a menu.

In Windows Forms, toolbars are represented by the ToolBar class, and individual buttons on it are represented by the ToolBarButton class. Note that these classes provide a fairly basic style of toolbar—Windows Forms provides no support for undocking toolbars or even rearranging them.

The ToolBar Class

ToolBar is a fairly simple class. It inherits from Control and must be docked; most applications dock the toolbar to the top of the window. ToolBar is a simple class to use—it adds only a few properties to its base class.

The class provides an Appearance property, which must be one of the members of the ToolBarAppearance enumeration: either Normal (the default) or Flat. When set to Normal, each toolbar button has a button-like raised edge. However, most applications favor the Flat style these days, where the toolbar appears completely flat, and the buttons have no outline except when the mouse is over them.

The ToolBar also controls where any text associated with a button appears through its TextAlign property. ...