C# TabControl

TabControl Control

The TabControl manages tab pages where each page may host different child controls. In this article, I will demonstrate how to create and use a TabControl in Windows Forms.

I wrote an article Working with Windows TabControl with C# in 2003 using .NET 2.0 and since then, things have been changed. This article is written using Visual Studio 2010.

Creating a TabControl

We can create a TabControl control using a Forms designer at design-time or using the TabControl class in code at run-time or dynamically.

Design-time

To create a TabControl control at design-time, you simply drag and drop a TabControl control from Toolbox onto a Form in Visual Studio. After you drag and drop a TabControl on a Form, the TabControl1 is added to the Form and looks like Figure 1.

Figure 1

A TabControl is just a container and has no value without tab pages. As you can see from Figure 1, by default two Tab Pages are added to the TabControl. We can add and remove tab pages by clicking on the Tasks handle and selecting Add and Remove Tab links as you see in Figure 2.

Figure 2

Add Tab link adds next tab page and Remove Tab removes the current tab page from a Tab Control. We will discuss tab pages in more details later in this tutorial.

Run-time

TabControl class represents a tab control. The following code snippet creates a TabControl and sets its Name, BackColor, ForeColor, Font, Width, and Height properties.

C# Code:

// Create a TabControl and set its properties

TabControl dynamicTabControl = new TabControl();
dynamicTabControl.Name = "DynamicTabControl";
dynamicTabControl.BackColor = Color.White;
dynamicTabControl.ForeColor = Color.Black;
dynamicTabControl.Font = new Font("Georgia", 16);
dynamicTabControl.Width = 300;
dynamicTabControl.Height = 200;

Once the TabControl control is ready with its properties, we need to add it to a Form by calling Form.Controls.Add method. The following code snippet adds a TabControl control to the current Form.

C# Code:

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