Visual Studio Hacks

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Chapter 13, Enhancing Visual Studio

#95 View an Outline of Your Controls

HACK

HACK

#95

View an Outline of Your Controls Hack #95

Drill-down, select, and drag ‘n’ drop all your controls, even on the most

complicated forms.

In Windows Forms development, a large number of controls contain other

controls. The

GroupBox control can be used to group a number of controls

together, particularly useful when working with radio buttons. A

Panel con-

trol can be used to host controls, organize them, control their visibility, and

more. One of the confusing parts of Windows Forms development is keep-

ing track of all of these controls, where they are, and what control they are

contained in.

A freely available power toy from Microsoft called the Control Outline

makes this task a lot easier. You can get it from http://www.gotdotnet.com/

team/ide.

After installing and enabling the power toy, you will have a new window

that shows all of your controls in an easy-to-read and -understand outline.

You can access this window from View

➝ Other Windows ➝ Control Out-

line. This window can be seen in Figure 13-14.

As you can see, it is very easy to quickly look at the outline and determine

where a control is in the container hierarchy. You can also click on a con-

trol in this outline, and it will be selected on your form, which helps when

you have nested a number of controls. It is hard to select these kinds of con-

trols in the ...