Request: TabControlPage Border

Something like this:

Hi tobi,

I'm using the TabControl with the Office 2007 appearance to hold the wizard steps, but I'm only showing 1 tab (step) at a time. I put a GroupBox control with the Back, Next and Cancel/End buttons on the first tab, then when the user changes steps (i.e. tab pages), I use the SetParent API to move the GroupBox to the current TabControlPage.

I'll see if I can strip out some of the code from my current test project (it uses 3rd party libraries for some functions) and upload an example project for you to examine.

Hi jpbro,

thanks for your sample ! It works and is really cool !

I had an idea that I could simulate the TabControlPage border by putting a Transparent TabControlPage on the TabControl, and then putting a transparent MarkupLabel on the TabControlPage. The MarkupLabel would have a Border object with corner radius and background color as required. Unfortunately, I experienced some problems:

1) The MarkupLabel isn't a container control, so regular labels and other lightweight controls get covered by it. Can the MarkupLabel be made into a container control? I think it would be useful in a number of cases, where you want to use Markup for a background but have other controls on top of it (including lightweight controls).
2) The MarkupLabel transparency seems to be grabbing the TabControl background bitmap incorrectly. See this screenshot:




Notice the light border arund the top and the dark border around the bottom of the MarkupLabel border. These seem to be getting sucked out of the edges of the TabControl instead of where the MarkupLabel is actually positioned over.

3) There doesn't seem to be any colours in the PaintManager.ColorSet to match the border of the TabControl with Office2007 appearance, so the closest that I got was that grey color (shown above). I see properties like TabExcelNormalLeftInnerBorder and TabPropertyPage2003BorderLeftHighlight, so can the equivalent TabOffice2007* colors be added?

Here's a sample project:

uploads/20090322_105556_WizardSkeleton.zip

So:

1) Can the MarkupLabel control be turned into a container?
2) Can the transparency issue of the MarkupLable on a transparent TabControlPage be fixed?
3) If #2 is impossible, how about adding borders including color and outside transparency) to the TabControlPage?
4) Can the TabOffice2007* color properties be added to the TabControl.PaintManager.ColorSet object?

Thanks.

Thanks Oleg, that solves question #2. How about these (in particular #1 and #4):

1) Can the MarkupLabel control be turned into a container?
2) Can the transparency issue of the MarkupLable on a transparent TabControlPage be fixed?
3) If #2 is impossible, how about adding borders including color and outside transparency) to the TabControlPage?
4) Can the TabOffice2007* color properties be added to the TabControl.PaintManager.ColorSet object?

Otherwise solving #2 doesn't matter much since I still can't get the proper result.