Visual Studio Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 95. View an Outline of Your Controls

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 control can be used to host controls,
organize them, control their visibility, and more. One of the
confusing parts of Windows Forms development is keeping 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 Outline. This window can be seen in
Figure 13-14.

Figure 13-14. Control Outline window

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 control 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 controls in the designer.

This power toy also includes a couple of other very useful features.
You can select a control in the Control Outline and click the Delete
button to remove the control from the form. On top of that, you can
drag and drop controls around the control outline. In the example
shown in Figure 13-14, you could drag
button3 outside of the
groupbox1 control and drop it on the
panel1 control. This would move that control, and
any controls nested under that control, to the new container control.
Both features are timesaving and are much easier to do than trying to
select and move those controls on the overly busy form designer.

The Control Outline power toy is an easy-to-install and easy-to-use
feature that can be very helpful when developing Windows Forms
applications.