he WinForm controls provided by the .NET Framework 1.1 are extremely useful, and the framework for developing new custom controls provided in 1.1 is very strong, but sometimes the development community expects more out-of-the box. Many needs of the development community are satisfied by the basic collection of WinForm controls while some developers have voiced their need for more functionality. Microsoft appears ready to rise to the occasion with the inclusion of many new WinForm controls.

The set of user controls that are an integral part of Microsoft's development environments provide the baseline for rapid application development (RAD). Every release of the IDE brings new controls to accelerate the development of user-friendly GUIs. Microsoft has seemed content with providing a strong set of base controls, and a framework allowing the development community and third-party Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to tackle the really heavy lifting in developing complex controls.

Microsoft is starting to break with that strategy with Visual Studio .NET and really follows through with the new controls that appear in the Toolbox of the alpha build of Whidbey. The new controls include everything from data-centric, to layout-oriented containers, to significantly improved versions of existing controls. A few new controls plug up holes in the existing user control line-up.

It is probable that many new or improved WinForm controls covered in this article will change, perhaps dramatically, as Whidbey progresses from alpha through beta to the final release, and new controls could surface. What you can expect for sure is that the quality, ease-of-use, and RAD characteristics of the new WinForm controls will continue to increase beyond the already impressive alpha.

Simplifying Common Tasks

Figure 1. The StandardMainMenu Component: This component generates a MainMenu control populated with the commonly used standard Windows application menu items

Microsoft designed the .NET Framework to allow the developer to easily create either custom controls or extend existing controls to provide custom features. Although developers can easily create their own custom functionality, some tasks are so common that it is better to have a standard control that facilitates performing that task.

Enhanced Menu Options
The current MainMenu control is very useful and powerful; the in-place editing feature makes it very easy to design complex collections of menu items. One glaring omission is the left-hand image stripe that can be seen on all the menu items in the IDE, but was not available on the standard MainMenu control. The MainMenu class has been updated in Whidbey with three properties used to implement the image margin visual element: ImageList, IsImageMarginPresent, and ImageMarginColor. The new ImageList property can be set to make the desired images available for menu items, the IsImageMarginPresent property controls the visibility of the image region down the left side of any drop-down menu, and ImageMarginColor controls the color to be used for the image margin.

You will often use the same set of common menu items in many applications as a part of standard Windows application design. Common menu items include the File, Edit, and Help menus. If you often use many of these common elements, you will save time by using the StandardMainMenu component. The StandardMainMenu component on the Toolbox creates a MainMenu control, as shown in Figure 1 and will auto-populate all the standard Window menu items. From this starting point, you should delete or disable the items you do no need.