Showing and hiding parts of winforms (extending?) C# .NET

Question

I have a question about forms and controls. I want to add the ability to sort of make a part of my form only show when something is clicked. For example I have form1 and on the form i have a button and when that button is clicked the form grows or extends (slides out?) to show other controls that werent there before the button was clicked. I have no idea what this is called so I don't know what to look for but Ive seen it used in many other applications. Any information on this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You'd probably have to roll your own animation, increasing the size dimensions of your form (or panel, or whatever) on a timer, thereby exposing the previously hidden controls.

        Timer T = new Timer();
        T.Interval = 10;
        T.Tick += (s, e) =>
        {
            myForm.Size = new System.Drawing.Size(myForm.Width + 10, myForm.Height);
            if (myForm.Size.Width >= FormWidthThreashold)
                T.Stop();
        };
        T.Start();

At the risk of stating the obvious, I don't suppose there's any way to switch the WPF? This stuff is built in, and quite easy for WPF. If not though, something like this should get you started.

Answer 2

I've done this before. Start by organising your form into logical sections. Don't leave all your controls on the form, place them inside panels. At Design-time you'll need to have the panels "fully expanded", but then at runtime you manipulate the panels' left, top, width, height, and maybe even the alignment and anchors properties, through code. You could use a timer as suggested by @Adam Rackis.. or you could change the increment value to alter the speed of the animation. The animation itself is just a loop that starts with x = x1 and ends with x = x2, where x = x + increment_value inside the loop. As the value of "x" changes, the component will be automatically redrawn. To get a smoother effect you might need to repaint the control (or the entire panel) on each iteration. If it runs too fast, you can either insert a delay or try to make the loop rely on a timer. I've had problems with timers for this kind of stuff, but admittedly I wasn't using C#.NET at the time (I did it in Delphi). It takes a lot of fiddling with the fine details to get this working nicely, so be patient, it's not Flash! Good luck.