Creating Wizards for Windows Forms in C#

Question

I am new in Creating Wizards for Windows Forms Application in C# .Net. So i don't have any idea in wizard creation. Please give me some ideas about creating Multiple wizard.

Regards, ravi

Answer 1

Lots of ways to do it. Creating a form for each wizard step is possible, but very awkward. And ugly, lots of flickering when the user changes the step. Making each step a UserControl can work, you simply switch them in and out of the form's Controls collection. Or make one of them Visible = true for each step. The UC design tends to get convoluted though, you have to add public properties for each UI item.

The easy and RAD way is to use a TabControl. Works very well in the designer since it allows you to switch tabs at design time and drop controls on each tab. Switching steps is trivial, just change the SelectedIndex property. The only thing non-trivial is to hide the tabs at runtime. Still easy to do by processing a Windows message. Add a new class to your form and paste the code shown below. Compile. Drop the new control from the top of the toolbox onto your form.

using System;
using System.Windows.Forms;

class WizardPages : TabControl {
  protected override void WndProc(ref Message m) {
    // Hide tabs by trapping the TCM_ADJUSTRECT message
    if (m.Msg == 0x1328 && !DesignMode) m.Result = (IntPtr)1;
    else base.WndProc(ref m);
  }
}

Answer 2

class WizardPages : TabControl
{
    protected override void WndProc(ref Message m)
    {
        // Hide tabs by trapping the TCM_ADJUSTRECT message
        if (m.Msg == 0x1328 && !DesignMode) m.Result = (IntPtr)1;
        else base.WndProc(ref m);
    }        

    protected override void OnKeyDown(KeyEventArgs ke)
    {
        // Block Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab hotkeys
        if (ke.Control && ke.KeyCode == Keys.Tab) 
            return;
        base.OnKeyDown(ke);
    }
}

Answer 3

You need to create your own to meet your own preferences. A tip will be for you to create a base form named like "frmWizard" then all your wizard windows will inherit from it. You should put common objects or wizard objects on the base class and modify \ override them on the derived class if needed.