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Combining two programs in one without new form - c#

I am doing my first steps programming a little toolbox in C#.
I want to choose the program to run via a menustrip.
How can I switch all visible textboxes, buttons etc. on the same form? I don't want to open a new form. Do I have to show/hide every element "by hand" or is there a better solution?
I hope you get my problem.
Thanks in advance.

Yes totally understood.
You need a way to navigate between different fragments within your application.
Since these are your first steps and not a legacy app, why aren't you starting with WPF which is the successor of Winforms ? (newer better)
See how can you achieve such functionally in WPF
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/desktop/wpf/app-development/navigation-overview?view=netframeworkdesktop-4.8
Although the terms are similar and also apply in winforms.

What you want to do is to create all the buttons etc as part of a UserControl. You can then add your custom UserControl to the form. This should allow you to switch the user control for some other control, or change the visibility for the whole user control.
This can also allow you to place multiple user controls side by side or in some other layout.

Create Single Window Navigation in WPF

I want to create a kiosk mode application using WPF. I want to use a single window because the user should not be able to exit this fullscreen application.
The application should guide the user trough a process. When the user proceeds trough the process, the screen should constantly change and show him the next step.
Usually I just create a single window and use a "state machine" to switch UserControls containing the information for the current step. Is there a better way to achieve this functionality? Maybe I would get a better result using multiple windows or Pages (never used them).
The reason why I am asking is that in future I want to have a simple, clean way of switching the content inside a single window. i.e. I am planning to implement some sort of animation when switching content (like sliding to the next / previous step). I don't want to put more effort into my current approach if it isn't the most flexible and clean one.
Any ideas?
PS: This is about desktop applications. Today I come from the Winforms environment and am experimenting with WPF.

There's a few ways you can achieve this.
First would be to use a Page based application, this will allow you to use a single window. Here is a pretty interesting tutorial
A bonus of using this approach is that navigation between pages is built in.
Your requirements are that you need to use animation for transitioning between pages, as far as I'm aware, using a Page based application cannot achieve this (I may be wrong). So your other option would be to use a UserControl MVVM approach.
This probably won't make a lot of sense now, but here goes:
You can use a single master view model which will hold multiple child view models, each of these could have a visibility property which dictates the visibility of the associated view. The master view model would simply be responsible for displaying the appropriate view model depending on where the user currently is in the application.
Using some clever XAML, you can create storyboards (animations) when the view becomes visible, which will allow you to achieve the crazy awesome animations that you require.
Anyway, that probably didn't make any sense, so here's a tutorial to get you started with MVVM.

Is it bad practice to instantiate a Form from a UserControl?

I am building an application using the .NET CF Framework and I had a situation where I wanted to present the user with a custom Dialog Box.
My solution was to create a simple Form with radio buttons for choices and a button. When clicked the button saves the selected radio button value to a public property and closes the Form.
The UserControl, after calling ShowDialog on the Form, inspects the public property to learn what option the user picked.
This worked perfectly. I'm just wondering if this is bad practice and if i'm going to get myself in trouble, somehow by doing this. It seems odd that a UserControl should be creating a Form.
Is there a better way to go about creating a custom Dialog Box from within a UserControl?

Absolutely nothing wrong with that. It is essentially the same as calling MessageBox.Show() from a UserControl.
And yes, accessing the result as a public property is the way to do it.
I'm guessing that this will be a dialog? You should consider using the DialogResult if you have multiple 'exit' options - OK, Cancel, etc.

Short answer: No, it shouldn't give you any problems.
Long answer: As your application grows, doing things like opening a Form directly from a UserControl might give you some spaghetti-like code. If you write an application larger than a few thousands lines of code, your Form and UserControl code behind files should typically be quite empty. They should not contain any business logic, and preferably not any UI logic either. Look at patterns such as Passive View how to achieve this.

Bubbling Events from UserControl using MVVM in WPF..?

First of all, I want to let everyone know that I'm very new to the MVVM concept, and have looked pretty extensively for some explanation of what I want to do, but to no avail.
In the program I'm working on, I have a UserControl with a few buttons on it, which need to control the navigation of the main window. I have 3 different "pages" I want to be able to switch between in my main window. Instead of pages, I decided (for whatever reason, correct me if this is not the best approach) to use a UserControl for each page, and switch the visibility to the correct one. I need the data to persist while switching, so I don't believe that creating new instances of the Usercontrols will work.
My question is: How can I bubble the events from my "NavBarView" to the main window in a way that will allow me to switch the visibility, but in a MVVM way? I know I may be completely going about this the wrong way, and I'm happy to take any suggestions on a better way of achieving this navigation.
I have to use WPF, so WinForms is not an option. Too much transparency and custom controls for WinForms.

I would make the "NavBar" part of the main window if possible and use that to control the sub controls in the forms. I would be careful nesting User Controls. If you can avoid it I would (key indication is are you going to reuse it somewhere else). I took over a project a while back that had a main window with 3 separate highly coupled user controls that had to all work together and it was a nightmare. The only way I could get it to work somewhat safely was to have them all set their data context to the same view model. If I had to do it from scratch - would have taken a completely different approach with a single view.

Developing wizard UI - WPF

All in WPF:
Developing a wizard application, user has to answer a number of simple questions before brought to the main app. The main app is then prefilled with the information obtained from the wizard.
I started with a Window which I then planned to add usercontrols to. The main window would have the user control in the first row, then Next and Previous buttons to control moving between the controls in the second row. This way I could easily control the logic to switch between screens like:
WizardControl1.IsVisible = false;
WizardControl2.IsVisible = true;
But for some reason, user controls do not have setter for IsVisible. Hurray.
So then I thought I would just use seperate windows for each section of the wizard. The problem with this approach is that now when stepping between, the window opens in random positions, and by steppign through the wizard with next, the next window pops up randomly which is really distracting and frustrating.
So how can I develop a wizard properly? I don't get why this is so hard...not exactly rocket science... replacing text and controls and storing input after pressing next/previous!
Thanks

Check this link:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/InternationalizedWizard.aspx
This is the article about building wizard in WPF by Josh Smith, it's seems to be nice pattern.
I found it's helpful for me, hope you'll too.

There is also an open source Avalon Wizard control on codeplex.

I'd probably aproach this using data binding and template selectors. Have the wizard form bind to a "WizardData" class, which exposes a list of "WizardPage" base classes.
The WizardData class can expose properties defining the correct info on the forms, and display a control for the main page that uses a template selector to determine the proper control to display based on the actual type of the particular wizard page.
It sounds like more work than it is, really. It also gives you the benefit of good separation between code and UI (all "work" is done by the WizardData and WizardPage classes), and the ability to test logic independent of the UI.
It's also a very WPF/MVVM way of approaching the problem.

I recognize this does not directly address your question, but I thought I'd mention it as a possible alternative. I've used Actipro's Wizard control with pretty good results, and when I have needed support, they have been very responsive. I am not affiliated with them in any way; I just like not having to write the plumbing to manage a wizard.

The property is called "Visibility".
I find that I do better when I dynamically add and removing controls rather than hide them.

I was looking for a Wizard solution too. I have the need to stick with stock WPF components so I implemented the wizard using a standard form and a tab control.
I only hide the tabs at runtime so there available in the IDE. At runtime just use Back, Next, Finish... to navigate thru the tab items
works good