After having looked at how to change the background colour of the tab header I got to wondering what else can be done to the tabs using WPF.In a very short time my question changed from “What can be done?” to “What can’t be done?”
As was shown here by MVP Ged Mead you can easily set the background colour of the tabs on a tab control, and a solution to the setting the background of the header here. Those posts got me wondering just what else could be done with the tabs on a tab control.
With very little time and effort I ended up with a tab control that looked like the following.
As you can see the captions on the tabs are quite varied and although you can’t tell from the image the last tab is very different. The first tab has text with mixed styles, the second tab has a rectangle included with the text and it looks like I have images on the last two tabs, but in fact the last tab has a video playing on it. Yes, I did say video. Complete with sound.
Believe it or not his whole tab control was created with just 33 lines of XAML markup.
So leveraging the power of WPF we can easily create much more visually stimulating tab controls than you could with previous versions of Visual Studio.
I’ll create a companion video for this and post it up in a couple of days which will also show the video on the fourth tab playing.