Winforms - how to show/hide elements in designer?

Question

I am trying to make a multiple page application using winforms. I decied to use multiple Panels - each panel represents different page, so I can switch between them when I need to display different content.

My problem is about stacking panels in designer view. When I have 2+ full screen panels, they all stack on each other and I can't see the one that I created earlier. Is there any solution to this ? Changing visibility does not affect designers view. Think of it as a photoshop-like option to show/hide layers. I'm using Visual C# 2010 Express.

Answer 1

Several options here:

1. Use the Document Outline view (View --> Other Windows --> Document Outline) to select the panel you care about. You can right-click on it and choose Bring to Front to put it in front of everything else.
2. Though it's probably not relevant to what you're doing, you might consider using a TabControl, which you can mess with visually at design time. This is only a reasonable solution if you want your users to be able to manually change which panel they're viewing.
3. Consider moving your panels into custom UserControl classes and work on them separately. If the content and logic of these panels is reasonably self-contained then you may want to do this anyway just to better restructure your code.

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Addendum: You can also use a hack that makes a TabControl's tabs invisible to the user. Put a TabControl on your form, and at run-time set the ItemSize height to 1. This makes it (almost) impossible for the user to change the tabs on their own, but still allows you to change the visible tab in the designer.

myTabControl.ItemSize = new Size(myTabControl.ItemSize.Width, 1); 

Note that I called this a hack for a reason: TabControls were not meant to be used this way. It's something that appears to work, but like all hacks it may break at any time so you should only do it as a last resort (and don't blame me if it causes headaches later on...). In short, I do not recommend this hack, I only offer it as a possibility.