Tabbed MDI Interface

[Martin]

Hi all!

As a preparation of a conversion from VB6 to VB2005 I'm playing around with
VB2005. One of the first things that strike me is the user-interface. In all
documentation Microsoft keeps going on about this beautiful Tabbed MDI
Interface that we all should be using. And I agree, it is nice. So I set out
to build my first test-app and guess what? I can't find how to create a
Tabbed MDI Interface... I do see the "old" MDI container, but I can't find
anywhere something like a "Windows Tabs" control to put in my MDI container.

Does anyone else find this weird too? Or am I simply overlooking something?

Tia,
Martin

 

[Jay Taplin]

No, you're not overlooking something. M$ has talked about it, but word is,
from Windows Forms Program Manager Ben Willett, it does not contain the
Tabbed MDI control:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=57704&SiteId=1

There are, however, lots of third parties that do...

Jay Taplin

 

[Martin]

I hear you. It's just typical. In the VB6 IDE we had (for that time) great
looking menus with icons and our own apps had these ugly gray menus...

Now they keep on ranting about how wonderful this Tabbed MDI Interface is,
in their IDE but we should all be making regular MDI apps.

I have been looking for some decent (free) 3rd party controls, but they're
either in C# C++ or in some other language that I don't know and don't want
to know, or they look butt-ugly (pardon my french).

Oh well, hopefully in a year or so there will be better 3rd party controls
for VB.Net/2005 around. Right now it seems that the platform for making
serious apps is still good old VB6.

Thanks for your response!
Martin

 

[Jay Taplin]

You do have the option of building your forms as Components and placing them
on a real tab. This would mean no more MDI, but it does work. I built a
very large system this way, dynamically adding controls and such. Worked
real well, but for an existing system is a bit of work to implement.

If you'd like some code example, I could put some together... might take me
a day or two to get at it though.

Jay Taplin, MCP

 

[Martin]

Hi Jay,

This is very friendly of you, but not necessary. In our VB6 app we had
written a control ourselves, which basically existed of a tabstrip on a
container. Every form that opened "reported for duty" to the MDI parent, who
added the form to the tabstrip. And when the user closed the form, the MDI
parent got notified again, and removed the applicable tab. This worked fine,
however for the latest version of our app (still VB6) we replaced this
control with a 3rd party control that looks just like the MDI Tabs in the
IDE and automatically adds and removes the form tabs. Functionally the same,
but it looked a lot better.
At this point I am preparing the conversion of this VB6 app to VB2005 and
one of the things I noticed was that to my surprise there was no MDI Tabs
control included. The VB6 version (of course) does not work in VB2005, so
this probably just means we have (again) to buy one.

By the way, I found a real nice one on the internet
http://www.codeproject.com/vb/net/v...100&forumid=104600&select=1335171&msg=1335171
and tested with that. It basically does the job, and looks fine, but a few
important features are missing: No close button (yes, really), not
scrollable and no option to put it upside-down (to use at the bottom).

For now I use this one, but when I get's closer to the release date of the
..net version of our app (still months and months to go) then it will be time
to look for a better one (or buy one).

Thanks again,
Martin