How to create an options screen similar to Office 2007 in .NET

Question

I think the options screen in Office 2007 is much preferrable to the "traditional" fixed-size options dialog with multiple tabbed pages. What would be the best way to create a similar options screen for my own .NET application? Is there an existing control I can buy (or use for free) to do this? Would it be easier to do this in WPF?

For those that haven't seen it, Office 2007 presents the options as a vertical list, divided into groups, that can be scrolled if the entire list doesn't fit in the window. One thing I'd like that isn't in Office is the ability to have a search box to do incremental searching/filtering of the options list.

EDIT: To clarify, I'm more interested in the scrolling behavior, grouping, and layout of the options than with the left/right split and tabbed behavior.

Answer 1

Use a splitter control on a windows form to split the form into the left and right panels.

Define each options set as a separate user defined control and layout your controls on each as desired.

When the user clicks on a different option type in the left hand panel: splittercontrol1.panel2.Controls.Remove(CurrentUserDefinedPanel); (where the CurrentUserDefinedPanel is that actual name of the user-defined panel/control!)

splittercontrol1.panel2.Controls.Add(new UserDefinedPanel2());

this.paint();

so, you remove the current user defined panel that is showing, and add the new one, then do a repaint...