Change content in a windows form

Question

I'm making an application in C# using windows forms, I want to completely swap out all the content in a windows form and replace it with something else. Is there any convenient way to do this?

Example: I have a menu, when I click "start" I want the menu to disappear and the game to start. I'm not using XNA or anything like that which is kind of the point of this whole project.

Answer 1

This works for me: Adding all the controls like:

form.Controls.AddRange(Pages.ToArray());

Then activating the needed one with

form.Controls[i].BringToFront();

Answer 2

Use one Panel for each unique content set you want to switch. Hide all of the panels, except the initial one. Create a variable activePanel. Set activePanel to current shown panel (i.e. initial one).

When you need to switch, do the following:

activePanel.Visible = false;
activePanel = <Panel you want to open now>; //I mean the Control, not an ID or something.
activePanel.Visible = true;

Another approach is to dynamically remove and add Controls to the form, but this way you'll have to write a lot more code, hovewer, your application memory footprint should be lesser.