Programming .NET Windows Applications

Status Bars

Status bars can provide additional information about your program, as well as to add controls to the bottom of your form for informational display. A status bar consists of a number of Panels (each of which may contain other controls), and you can display information directly on the status bar itself.

In the next example, you will modify the previous example to add a status bar that will display both the current time and the amount of time the application has been running, as shown in Figure 18-23.

Figure 18-24. Status bar demonstration

In addition, when you click on or hover over menu choices, the time panels will disappear and information about the menu choice will be displayed, as shown in Figure 18-24.

Figure 18-25. Hiding the panels

To add some spice to this application, when you left-click on the status bar, the elapsed timer will be reset to zero, and when you right-click on the status bar, a context menu will pop up, offering to reset, suspend, or resume the timer as shown in Figure 18-25.

Figure 18-26. Pop-up menu

Note

The complete source code is greatly duplicative of the previous example, so it will not be shown here, but it can be downloaded as StatusBarsCS or StatusBarsVB. ...