Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Take Control of Window Layout

.NET 2.0 includes two new container controls that can lay out all the controls they contain in a set pattern. Both of these controls extend the Panel class with additional layout logic. The FlowLayoutPanel arranges controls evenly over several rows (from left to right), or in multiple columns (from top to bottom). The TableLayoutPanel places its controls into a grid of invisible cells, allowing to you to keep consistent column widths and row heights.

Note

The new . NET layout controls give you a way to lay out controls in set patterns automatically, which can save a good deal of effort with highly dynamic or configurable interfaces.

How do I do that?

The layout controls are used most often in the following two scenarios:

• You have a dynamic interface that generates some of its elements programmatically. Using the layout controls, you can arrange a group of controls neatly without calculating a position for each control (and then setting the Location property accordingly).

• You have a localized interface that must adapt to different languages that require vastly different amounts of on-screen real estate. As a result, when the display text changes, the controls must also adjust their size. In this case, layout controls can help you make sure the controls remain properly arranged even when their size varies.

Example 3-4 demonstrates an implementation of the first scenario. It starts with a form that includes an empty FlowLayoutPanel. The FlowLayoutPanel has ...