Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Add Icons to Your Menu

Windows applications have been undergoing a gradual facelift since Windows XP and Office XP first appeared on the scene. Today, many modern Windows applications use a fine-tuned menu that sports a blue shaded margin on its left side, and an optional icon for each menu command. (To see what this looks like, you can jump ahead to Figure 3-5.)

Note

Jazz up your dullest menus with thumbnail images.

If you wanted to create a polished-looking menu with this appearance in .NET 1.0 or 1.1, you needed to draw it yourself using GDI+ code. Although there are several surprisingly good examples of this technique available on the Internet, it's more than a little messy. In .NET 2.0, the situation improves dramatically. Even though the original MainMenu and ContextMenu controls are unchanged, two new controls—MenuStrip and ContextMenuStrip—provide the same functionality but render the menu with the new Office XP look.

How do I do that?

The MenuStrip and ContextMenuStrip classes leverage all the hard work that went into building the ToolStrip class. Essentially, a MenuStrip is a special container for ToolStripItem objects. The MenuStrip.Items property holds a collection of top-level menu headings (like File, Edit, View, and Help), each of which is represented by a ToolStripMenuItem object. Each ToolStripMenuItem has a DropDownItemsProperty, which exposes another collection of ToolStripMenuItem objects, one for each contained menu item.

Example 3-2 shows code that creates ...