It’s been several years since my last WinForms programming experience – I’m a ASP.NET maniac since 2002/2003 – but this year started with an unexpected challenge: build a Visual Studio 2008 Integration Package (VSIP) with an advanced Editor for some in-house metadata xml structure.
If you already did some work related to VSIP is no surprise that I was forced to embrace the long ago forgotten Winforms controls specificities.
Maybe I simply forgot or never noticed before, but the TabControl when operating in vertical mode – either Left or Right – display an amazing poor user experience and in most cases text are not showed.
Ok, no big deal, TabControl have enough extensibility points to enable us to work around and its even available a Msdn article with the recipe: How to: Display Side-Aligned Tabs with TabControl.
Maybe it’s just me but this is the kind of behavior I did expect to be fully available and functional since it seams to be quite common in most applications.