MDI child forms without title bars

  • Thread starter Thread starter Scott McChesney
  • Start date Start date
S

Scott McChesney

Hi, folks. I've been searching the 'net for a while, and I'm not finding
what I want, so I thought I'd ask for some help here. Perhaps I'm looking
at this wrong.

I'm developing an application, and the goal is to get an Outlook-style app.
So I've been searching through Outlook, seeing everything that's available,
and developing a plan of attack. My initial thought was to develop each
content piece as a UserControl, and I'd just load what I wanted. Seemed
simple enough.

However, when I started looking at all the events and other things I would
have to code into my base UserControl so that I could talk to the main form
appropriately - interacting with menu items, toolbars, and all the other
controls - that seemed like a poor idea.

So I lit upon the concept of using a MDI parent form and maximized child
forms with no title bar. The problem is that maximized child forms still
show the standard MDI child indicators - a control box,
maximize/minimize/close buttons, etc. - even though I set them all to
"False" and cleared out the form title.

So here I am. I haven't gone too far down any road yet - I'm still trying
to conceptualize - but this MDI child idea has really grabbed me as a decent
idea. I know that third-party controls exist to turn MDI children into a
VS.NET-style tabbed display, so I feel the basic idea is possible/feasible.
Am I faced with a ton of subclassing? Not that I necessarily mind it - I
did it all the time in VB 6 - but I was hoping there was a slightly more
elegant way. Another reason was because I didn't want to get into a lot of
message handling, and I feel that it's more than just eating the WM_NCPAINT
and WM_NCACTIVATE messages. Maybe not.

Any help would be appreciated.

TIA

- Scott
 
A Little late, but I wanted the same thing and found this solution...

Don't set WindowState to Maximized and the title bar goes away.
It seems the Maximized doesn't need to be set anyway as though the Parent
knows it's a child form and seemingly maximizes the child form so you don't
see the backcolor of the MDI parent.
How this works with multiple forms open? I don't know yet... :)
 
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