WinForm Panel scrolling without a scrollbar?

Question

I'm creating a User Control that's basically a Panel (with random content inside), and I need to be able to scroll up and down this Panel using buttons (up and down) rather than the scrollbar.

The reason I have to do it this way is because the program will be used on a touch screen monitor and we need big buttons rather than an ugly little scrollbar.

I've been messing around with the VerticalScrollbar properties, and none of them seem to do anything. I've noticed that if I set AutoScroll to false, AutoScrollPosition actually shows coordinates, except negative of what it should be. Also, I've noticed that panel.VerticalScrollbar.Visible = true; only seems to work when placed outside of the constructor. Is there a reason for that?

Basically, WinForms' scrollbars are very confusing (buggy?) to me. Does anyone know a good way to scroll up and down a panel programmatically with buttons (I don't care if I need to have an invisible scrollbar).

Thank you! =D

Answer 1

Make your UserControl a regular UserControl (i.e inherit from UserControl instead of Panel) and place a Panel on your UserControl. Put any content/controls on the inner Panel, and then change the Panel's Left and Top properties to move it around without scrollbars. You could also add buttons to your UserControl to handle the movement of the inner Panel.

A simpler way, however, might be to just use really wide/high scrollbars, and set their Thumbwidth (I think this is the property) to the same large value - this will produce scrollbars that are easy to use with the fingers. To my knowledge there's no way to do this with the scrollbars that appear on a Panel with Autoscroll set to True, so you'd still need to use the method I mentioned above (with an inner Panel sitting on your UserControl) and add the scrollbars to move it yourself.

I agree that scrollbars in Windows suck, so while I'm normally in favor of just using the standard controls that everyone is used to, I don't see anything wrong with rolling your own in this case.