How Visual C# Helps You Code—Setting Tab Orders
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| © 2006 Peter Wright |
Setting Tab Orders
Imagine that you had a form like the one in Figure 7-10.
Figure 7-10. All forms require some attention to navigation order, especially when they get a little
complex like this one.
That’s a pretty complex form. Now imagine that you came across this form in an application
you had installed—perhaps it’s part of a registration dialog for an application you adore.
Out of the box there are a few assumptions you and any other user would make about how this
form works. Perhaps the biggest assumptions are that when you start editing the form, the cursor
will start in the topmost text box, and that pressing Tab will take you down through all the text
boxes in the form until you reach the bottom one. You would quickly lose faith in the program
if pressing the Tab key moved you all over the form in a seemingly random order.
When you design your user interfaces, C# Express provides you with help in specifying the tab order of the controls on forms.
Take a look at the View menu (see Figure 7-11).
Figure 7-11. Visual C# 2005 Express’s View menu
If you select the Tab Order item from the View menu, the form you are working on
changes to Tab Order mode, just like mine in Figure 7-12.
Figure 7-12. Selecting Tab Order from the View menu shows you the current tab order of the
controls on the form.
In Tab Order mode, all you need to do to set up the tab order of the controls on the form is
to simply click on them one by one. Don’t forget to click on the Label controls as well, because
you can set a hot key for a label by using & in the label’s Text property (for example, &Next to display Next); when you select a label by pressing its hot key, focus moves to the next control in
sequence.
When you are finished clicking away, just press the Esc key on the keyboard to leave Tab Order mode. What could be easier?
 
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