ProgressBar
The ProgressBar control
indicates how much of a long-running process the application has
completed. It provides the user with an indication that work is
progressing, and a rough idea of how long the user will need to wait for
work to complete. As Figure 5-8 shows, it is
approximately rectangular, and the nearer to completion the task is, the
more of the rectangle is filled in by a color bar. If an operation is
likely to take much more than a second, you should consider showing a
ProgressBar to let users know how
long they are likely to wait.
Figure 5-8. ProgressBar control
ProgressBar derives from
RangeBase, the same base class as the
scroll bar and slider controls discussed in the preceding section. From
a developer perspective, it is very similar to these other range
controls, the main difference being that it does not respond to user
input— sadly, users cannot drag the progress bar indicator to the right
in order to make things run faster. The progress indicator's size is
based on the Value property, so it is
your application's responsibility to update this as work
progresses.