Chapter 8 - OutlookBar Control

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Chapter 8 - OutlookBar Control

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Control Design

• OutlookBar Control Implementation

Building on the knowledge gained thus far, it's time to begin developing a more advanced control. The OutlookBar control is one of the most common custom controls used by applications. In fact, there are many Toolkits, providers of custom controls, which are companies that offer the OutlookBar as part of the standard offering of controls. At the end of this chapter, you will have created your own functional OutlookBar control to use in your projects.

The process of building the OutlookBar control is divided into three major sections: The OutlookBar control, a custom collection for managing OutlookBarTab components, and the control's designer. As with the other controls developed so far, the process will begin by first defining the requirements for the control, including the listing of properties, events, and public methods. In addition, the topic of custom events and custom event parameters will also be discussed.

As with the OutlookBarTab component developed in the preceding chapter, a test application will be created to aid in the development of the OutlookBar control. Remember, you'll need to get creative to test controls during their development rather than relying on the VS .NET IDE. The reasoning for this is that in the early stages of control development, the control will more than likely lack full support for interacting with the IDE. As such, creating small test applications will allow for basic testing and debugging until such time as the control provides the necessary support for the VS .NET IDE.