WinForms open popup usercontrol as menuitem menu dropdown?

Question

Been searching everywhere and can't find a way to do this.

I have a menubar across the top of my winforms program. Now it just pops up a normal menuitem menu. I would like to disable that menu and popup a nice looking usercontrol that looks like its the dropdown for that menu item but includes much more customization. A good example would be the gnome menu bar in OpenSuse or the Start Menu in windows vista.

Can anybody point me to a tutorial or help me out in finding a way to do this?

Right now I know that as long as the menuitem has no subitems a menu won't appear, which is what I want to do, but I would like to simulate that menu with my own usercontrol when that menuitem is clicked.

Thanks!!!

Answer 1

I had to add my own trackbar to the toolbar recently which involves deriving from ToolStripControlHost. I imagine that you will need to do something similar as MenuStrip is a derivation of ToolStrip.

This is an MSDN tutorial for using ToolStripControlHost and here is a CodeProject article about adding a custom control to a ToolStripDropDownButton.