Stephens' C# Programming with Visual Studio® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

Making Controls Arrange

Themselves

Lesson 2 explained how to add controls to a form and arrange them nicely. Using those tech-

niques, you can create forms like the one shown in Figure 3-1.

FIGURE 31

That form looks okay in Figure 3-1, but what if the user enlarges the form as shown in

Figure 3-2? Pretty lame, huh? Although the form is bigger, the areas that contain data are not.

FIGURE 32

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LESSON 3 Making Controls arrange theMselves

The URL for the book selected in Figure 3-2 is too long to fit within the GroupBox, so it is truncated

even though the form has extra wasted space on the right. The

ListBox isn’t big enough to display all

of its items even though there’s wasted space at the bottom. It would be nice if the controls rearranged

themselves to use the available space and display the entire URL and more list items.

Figure 3-3 shows another problem with this form.

If the user shrinks the form, the

TextBoxes and

URL

LinkLabel are chopped off, the Year Label

and

TextBox are chopped in half vertically, the

ListBox doesn’t fit, and the cover picture is com-

pletely missing.

The program would look nicer if the controls were

shrunk so you could at least see their edges. Some

of the values still wouldn’t fit but at least the form

wouldn’t look so a ...