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Show top most Child Form c#

How can I show topmost a button clicked child form in my parent form (with a tabcontrol which docked as fill)?
It always shows the form at the back of the tabcontrol of the parent form, I've even used:
frm.TopMost = true;
frm.BringToFront();
Still shows at the back.

What you want is not possible. MDI children of a control get shown on a control (which you can't directly select) called MdiClient, which is not transparent (and can't be) and by default, goes always to the back of other controls in the parent form.
So the only way to do this, would be getting the MdiClient over the controls in the parent form: this would do what you expect, but it would also hide the parent controls when there are no child forms displayed (since again, the MdiClient is not, and can't be transparent).
So the only reasonable way would be having a maximized child form with the TabControl, instead of having that TabControl directly on the parent.
Or you could have your TabControl only shown when there are no child windows. For that, make a timer in the parent form, and check this at every interval:
if(MdiChildren.Length > 0)
myTabControl.SendToBack();
else
myTabControl.SendToFront();
This will only work if the MDI children are always maximized: your TabControl will not be visible when there are any children (no matter if they cover it or not)
Update
As remarked in the comments, you can have "your own MDI", by having a host control (a Panel, for example) in the parent form and loading the child forms in that control:
var form = new ChildForm();
form.TopLevel = false;
form.Parent = myHostPanel;
form.Show();
This would show the form inside the panel (which you can locate and zorder where you want)... you lose all the MDI management though, and you'll have to keep track of your children (and take care of the forms' events if needed) yourself.
I'd not use this solution, it's pretty hacky and can get messy for big applications (unless you do a correct system)
As a summary
Since we're discussing these methods in the comments
You can hack your way to do what you want, but you'll come into all sorts of problems with any approach.
If I was you, I'd redesign my application so that what you want to achieve is not needed. If you can't do that, the only sane way would be just not having those controls in the parent form, have an always-maximized, non-closable MDI child form with those controls, and skip that window everytime you need to work in the MDI children collection.

Please explain what components of what frameworks you are using and what you have done so far. Without that information i suggest the following solution (untested).
In the "ButtonClick" event of your ParentForm do this:
ChildForm cf = new ChildForm();
cf.MdiParent = this;
cf.Show();
If this doesn't work you may add a
cf.Focus();

This question make me uncomfortable :). after a lot of testing, I can't really find a solution. neither BringToFront() Function nor SendToBack() Work Properly. maybe the following approach can help you. I use IntersectWith Function of Rectangle Class and test if form intersect with tabControl or not. if so change the tab control visibility to false otherwise true. take a look at the following code:
first make form declaration public at the mdi parent form:
public partial class MdiParentForm : Form
{
Form frm = new Form();
}
After that when you initialize your child form, add some handler to its locationChanged event, like this:
frm.MdiParent = this;
frm.LocationChanged += Frm_LocationChanged;
frm.Show();
And at the end, This is the handler:
private void Frm_LocationChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Rectangle tabControlRectangle = new Rectangle(tabControl1.Location, tabControl1.Size);
Rectangle childFormRectangle = new Rectangle(frm.Location, frm.Size);
if (tabControlRectangle.IntersectsWith(childFormRectangle))
{
tabControl1.Visible = false;
}
else
{
tabControl1.Visible = true;
}
}
Thanks to #Jcl, Problem with this is that the tab control will hide and show as long as any point of the child form touches its rectangle. Moving the child form around would be horrible :-)

Indexing into Controls Collection on Tab Control

I have a C# Forms tab application. Each TabPage has a menu on the left (Outlook style navigation panel), and a Panel on the right for content.
If I want the content panel for tab page 0, how would I go about fetching it? I'm a bit stumped because I don't know how to index into the controls collection on a tab page. The following is underlined in red, so I believe its wrong.
Panel panel = tabControl.TabPages[0].Controls["Panel"];
EDIT: remove Window in Panel sub question. It will be moved to a separate question.
Sorry about the beginner questions. I'm a C/C++ guy with lots of MFC time, and C# UI is a bit frustrating at the moment.

foreach (Control control in tabControl1.TabPages[0].Controls)
{
// if (control.Name == "panel1")
}
You can always call this recursively on control.Controls to find a control in any hierarchy. control.Name can be used to find your specific control.
You can't show a Form, inside a Panel. You could create Custom Control where you can add your functionality and add that control to a Panel.

in order to create a new form for example you need to create a variable of what ever form that it is you want to create.
example
Form2 frm2 = new Form2();
frm2.Show();
if you want to show that form in the panel then the panel would be the Owner keep in mind the difference between Owner and Parent
please paste what ever code you have so far and we can suggest the necessary changes

Finally, how does one display a Window in a Panel? - you don't want to do that. If you want a window and a panel to share a piece of UI functionality, create a user control with all the the functionality and then you can place it in a form or in a panel.

A possibility to encapsulate complex UI content is to create a UserControl. This way you can create a reusable piece of complex UI you can basically add as a "blob" inside a form.
The reason why
Panel panel = tabControl.TabPages[0].Controls["Panel"];
is underlined red is because the Controls collection returns a Control which might be a Panel but also might be something else. So you need to cast it:
Panel panel = tabControl.TabPages[0].Controls["Panel"] as Panel;
if (panel != null)
{
// got a panel here so do something
}
Also: MSDN has some good resources - you should make use of it.

Move contents of Form when a Control is re-Located

Let's just say that I have many controls on my Form, and when a User clicks on one of them, its height will expand. This means that, currently, when this clicked-control expands, other controls below it will become overlapped by the expanded control.
But what I want to happen, is for each Control below the expanded control to slide down, so that they are below the expanded control again.
I know how to handle sliding, but I just don't know how to make every control except for one move everytime a given control is moved.
Any help at all is greatly appreciated, thank you!
This is what I was thinking:
void newOrderReceived(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
foreach(Control OrderNotificationBox in OrdersPanel.Controls)
{
if(OrderNotificationBox is NotificationBox) // Checks to see if the control is a NotificationBox
{
// Add my code to slide controls down.
}
}
}
But... How do I know if the control is below the expanded control?
Is this how I should go about changing the location of all controls below the expanded control?
Edit: Just had a thought, to check to see if a NotificationBox is below the Expanded NotificationBox, see revised code below:
void newOrderReceived(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
foreach(Control OrderNotificationBox in OrdersPanel.Controls)
{
if(OrderNotificationBox is NotificationBox) // Checks to see if the control is a NotificationBox
{
if(OrderNotificationBox.Location.Y <= ExpandedNotificationBox.Location.Y + ExpandedNotificationBox.Size.Width)
{
// Add my code to slide controls down.
}
}
}
}
But would this be sufficient? Currently, this is working, so I guess I just answered my own question. But, isn't there a better way to do this? A more elegant/efficient way?
Here's a sample of how it should look:

FlowLayoutPanel provides you with dynamic layout where you can resize any control in it and all below controls will slide automatically. There are many strategies to using groups/columns of flow layout panels to be able to achieve the desired look for the whole form. Some googling will reveal some of these.
For instance in the form above, resizing the button1 control simply flows all the below controls to further down on the form. You can try that at the design time also. Drop the form a flow layout panel, drop 3-4 control in the container and start experimenting..

For each expandable content use Panel.
Dock your panels one under another (Use panel1.Dock = DockStyle.Top. For the very bottom panel use panel1.Dock = DockStyle.Fill).
Place your child controls inside of each expandable panel, set inner controls' Anchor properties accordingly.
When you expand one panel, the rest of the panels will adjust automatically. You don't need to code for this. You will only change Height of a panel that you currently expand.

What you need is some kind of 'ExplorerBar' functionality. There are several control libraries that offer that, and I found the article here on the CodeProject that has it for free.

C#: Windows Forms: Getting keystrokes in a panel/picturebox?

I'm making a level editor for a game using windows forms. The form has several drop down menus, text boxes, etc, where the user can type information.
I want to make commands like CTRL + V or CTRL + A available for working within the game world itself, not text manipulation. The game world is represented by a PictureBox contained in a Panel.
This event handler isn't ever firing:
private System.Windows.Forms.Panel canvas;
// ...
this.canvas = new System.Windows.Forms.Panel();
// ...
this.canvas.PreviewKeyDown += new System.Windows.Forms.PreviewKeyDownEventHandler(this.canvas_PreviewKeyDown);
What is the preferred way of doing this? Can a panel even receive keyboard input? I would like to allow the user to use copy/paste/select-all commands when working with the text input, but not when placing objects in the game world.

From the MSDN documentation for Control.CanSelect:
The Windows Forms controls in the
following list are not selectable and
will return a value of false for the
CanSelect property. Controls derived
from these controls are also not
selectable.
Panel
GroupBox
PictureBox
ProgressBar
Splitter
Label
LinkLabel (when there is no link present in the control)
Although it says controls derived from these controls cannot receive focus, you can create a derived control and use the SetStyle method to enable the "Selectable" style. You also must set the TabStop property to true in order for this to work.
public class SelectablePanel : Panel
{
public SelectablePanel()
{
this.SetStyle(ControlStyles.Selectable, true);
this.TabStop = true;
}
}
Then use this control instead of the normal Panel. You can handle the PreviewKeyDown event as intended.

You'll probably want to do the key capture at the form level. This is highly recommended reading from the person who helped write the underlying .NET code:
http://blogs.msdn.com/jfoscoding/archive/2005/01/24/359334.aspx

How to implement the Edit -> Copy menu in c#/.net

How do I implement a Copy menu item in a Windows application written in C#/.NET 2.0?
I want to let the user to mark some text in a control and then select the Copy menu item from an Edit menu in the menubar of the application and then do a Paste in for example Excel.
What makes my head spin is how to first determine which child form is active and then how to find the control that contains the marked text that should be copied to the clipboard.
Help, please.

With the aid of some heavy pair programming a colleague of mine and I came up with this, feel free to refactor.
The code is placed in the main form. The copyToolStripMenuItem_Click method handles the Click event on the Copy menu item in the Edit menu.
/// <summary>
/// Recursively traverse a tree of controls to find the control that has focus, if any
/// </summary>
/// <param name="c">The control to search, might be a control container</param>
/// <returns>The control that either has focus or contains the control that has focus</returns>
private Control FindFocus(Control c)
{
foreach (Control k in c.Controls)
{
if (k.Focused)
{
return k;
}
else if (k.ContainsFocus)
{
return FindFocus(k);
}
}
return null;
}
private void copyToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Form f = this.ActiveMdiChild;
// Find the control that has focus
Control focusedControl = FindFocus(f.ActiveControl);
// See if focusedControl is of a type that can select text/data
if (focusedControl is TextBox)
{
TextBox tb = focusedControl as TextBox;
Clipboard.SetDataObject(tb.SelectedText);
}
else if (focusedControl is DataGridView)
{
DataGridView dgv = focusedControl as DataGridView;
Clipboard.SetDataObject(dgv.GetClipboardContent());
}
else if (...more?...)
{
}
}

Why not extending the control, so the control itself provides the data which should be copied into the clipboard.
Take a look at ApplicationCommands documentation.

To determine which window is open, you can query the Form.ActiveMDIChild property to get a reference to the currently active window. From there, you can do one of two things:
1) If you create your own custom Form class (FormFoo for example) that has a new public member function GetCopiedData(), then inherit all of your application's child forms from that class, you can just do something like this:
((FormFoo)this.ActiveMDIChild).GetCopiedData();
Assuming the GetCopiedData function will have the form-specific implementation to detect what text should be copied to the clipboard.
or
2) You can use inheritance to detect the type of form that is active, and then do something to get the copied data depending on the type of form:
Form f = this.ActiveMDIChild;
if(f is FormGrid)
{
((FormGrid)f).GetGridCopiedData();
} else if(f is FormText) {
((FormText)f).GetTextCopiedData();
}
etc.
That should get you started with finding the active window and how to implement a copy function. If you need more help copying out of a GridView, it may be best to post another question.

If the form is tabbed and the target control is a DataGridView, it's sometimes possible for the Form's TabControl to be returned as the active control, using the above method, when the DataGridView is right clicked upon.
I got around this by implementing the following handler for my DataGridView:-
private void dataGridView_CellMouseDown(object sender, DataGridViewCellMouseEventArgs e)
{
if (e.Button == MouseButtons.Right)
{
dataGridView.Focus();
dataGridView.CurrentCell = dataGridView[e.ColumnIndex, e.RowIndex];
}
}

It seems to me that you might be better off breaking this into smaller tasks/questions.
You have a few issues you are stuck on from the way it sounds.
You have multiple 'child' windows open. Is this an MDI application?
When an action is performed on one of those child windows, it should fire an event in that window's event handlers. That is your first thing to set up. If this is a datagridview I would suggest a simple test to start. Try trapping the DataGridView.SelectionChanged event. Just throw in something like MessageBox.Show("I copied your datas!"); for now.
This should get you started where you will at least understand how this event will be raised to you.
From here, we will need to know a little more about your datagrid, and the rows and child controls in those rows. Then we can likely create events in the render events that will be raised at the appropriate times, with the appropriate scope.