Navigating without Tabbers

hi!
you can navigate a program by using tabbers. but when i don't want tabbers, but my own controls, how do i do this?
do i have to use a panel for each "tab" and hide/show it when toggling?
any ideas would be appreciated.
thanx :)

This is probably the best approach. Recently I had to do something like this where I wanted a tabbing system in a toolbar. Placing each "screen's" controls in a panel works great, although you can use any of the other control containers as well.

yes sure, but how do i switch these panels within the form editor? how do i position them?

I found it was easiest to make each of the panels content a user control for designer support.

you mean like a custom control that works like a tabber, with invisible tabs and it can be accessed by code?
are there any controls for that?

I inherit a ToolStrip as the basis of my custom TabControl, and then as already mentioned in this thread, use a UserControl as the TabPage. Then it's just a case of adding a few helpers into the custom tab control such as Pages.Add, Pages.Remove, and so on.

I try to avoid using the regular TabControl as it seems to flicker way too much, it lacks any decent paint override events, there's no double-buffering property to help reduce flicker... it's just generally speaking very nasty.

I just used a toolbar as the basis for showing the tabs since they offer some cool built in rollovers and visual appeal. From there I wrote a manager as theoobe suggested that allows you to add/remove pages, and also check to see if a page is already open if a user requests a new instance of it and sets it to active. From there each tab once clicked could display my custom user control (which has whatever content I want on it).

I could post it if needed.

umh. i never wrote good custom controls before... are there any available for free?