Can I create a multiple-column context menu in .NET Windows Forms?

Question

I want to create a context menu that has several columns. Basically it would go like this:

First item  | [common option] | All Options >
Second item | [common option] | All Options >
Third item  | [common option] | All Options >
Fourth item | [common option] | All Options >

So basically there are a bunch of items (generated at runtime), each item can be launched on its own; or with a commonly used option; or you can get a submenu with all possible options.

How can I do this? I'm trying to abuse both ContextMenuStrip and ContextMenu, yet they don't seem to have any such options. Still I seem to recall having seen multi-column menus somewhere...

I'd prefer a Windows Forms solution, because I don't have any WPF experience. Oh, and this context menu will open when clicking on an icon in the Notification Area (aka systray).

Answer 1

I don't know about ContextMenuStrip, which is a menu built entirely in .NET code, but you can definitely do this with ContextMenu, which is a wrapper over the native system menus.

The key is setting the MFT_MENUBREAK or MFT_MENUBARBREAK flags for the individual menu item(s), which are exposed as properties in the MenuItem class wrapper: MenuItem.Break and MenuItem.BarBreak, respectively.

The former just places the menu item in a new column, while the latter places the item into a new column and separates the column with an etched vertical line.

From the MSDN example:

public void CreateMyMenus()
{
    // Create three top-level menu items.
    MenuItem menuItem1 = new MenuItem("&File");
    MenuItem menuItem2 = new MenuItem("&New");
    MenuItem menuItem3 = new MenuItem("&Open");

    // Set the BarBreak property to display horizontally.
    menuItem2.BarBreak = true;
    menuItem3.BarBreak = true;

    // Add menuItem2 and menuItem3 to the menuItem1's list of menu items.
    menuItem1.MenuItems.Add(menuItem2);
    menuItem1.MenuItems.Add(menuItem3);
}