Managing Lots of Overlapping Controls in Visual Studio

Question

I'm using different sets of controls on the same location on a form. By default all are visible=false and then certain subsets of the controls are set to visible as the user selects specific values in a combobox dropdown control.

From the user's perspective this works well since they only see the controls that are needed.

However, since the controls occupy the same location on the form it is difficult to manage these in Visual Studio design view.

Is there a way to group sets of these overlapping controls in Visual Studio so that I can select the entire subset of controls quickly and easily? Is there a way to hide certain controls in design view? Right now everything is stacked on top of each other when developing so it makes managing these controls difficult.

Answer 1

To get such a beast to work i would put every group into it's own UserControl. On your MainForm you stack all these UserControls above each other.

So at the MainForm you can't really get a good overview, but now you got for every group your individual designer view and in your main form you can hide the complete group by a single line of code userControl.Visible = false.

Answer 2

You can not hide them.

However you can group them in group box and using "Bring to front" and "Send to back" property deal with them.

Answer 3

A TabControl can do this, works well in design mode. You just need to hide the tabs at runtime. Check my code in this thread.