Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Add Any Control to a ToolStrip

The ToolStrip supports a wide range of ToolStripItem classes, allowing you to add everything from buttons and drop-down menus to text-boxes and labels. However, in some situations you might want to go beyond the standard options and use other .NET controls, or even place your own custom controls in the ToolStrip. In order to make this work, you need to use the ToolStripControlHost.

Note

Want to outfit a ToolStrip with a custom control? Thanks to the ToolStripControlHost, you can add just about anything.

How do I do that?

There's no way to add standard .NET controls directly to the ToolStrip, because the ToolStrip only supports classes that derive from ToolStripItem. You could create a class that derives from ToolStripItem to implement a custom ToolStrip element, but this approach is fairly complex and tedious. A much simpler approach is to use the ToolStripControlHost, which can wrap just about any .NET control.

To use the ToolStripControlHost with a non-ToolStripItem control, just pass the control object as a constructor argument when you create the ToolStripControlHost. Then, add the ToolStripControlHost object to the ToolStrip. You can use the code in Example 3-1 to add a CheckBox control to the ToolStrip.Items collection. Figure 3-4 shows the result.

Example 3-1. Adding a Checkbox control to a ToolStrip.Items collection

' Create a CheckBox. Dim CheckStrip As New CheckBox( ) ' Set the CheckBox so it takes the size of its text. CheckStrip.AutoSize ...