Windows Forms Layout in Dr. Dobb's Journal
While thumbing through the new issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal at breakfast today, lo' and behold but what should I see? A Windows Forms layout article - specifically one on creating your own layout manager!
The author - Richard Grimes - takes you through a good summary of the basics of the layout functionality present in the currently shipping version of Windows Forms. He touches on Docking and Anchoring, Layout events, and few other less-than-highly-visible areas. He then goes on to create a new managed layout container, called a FlowPanel.
Now for those of you in the audience who have been paying attention to developments in Visual Studio.NET 2005 aka Whidbey, you'll note that we'll be shipping something very similar in Windows Forms 2.0, called the FlowLayoutPanel. Though our panel is obviously more feature-rich than Grimes' sample, he provides a small, crisp subset that is easy to understand and well-worth the reading.
And incidentally, it's always gratifying to see articles like this. The simple fact that this article a) exists, and b) was published attests to the fact that folks actually want this functionality ... which means we made the right call in investing in it for the next version.
Check out the article here: http://www.ddj.com/articles/2004/0411/
