Introduction

When a panel is hidden, its child controls are hidden too, regardless of their own visibility status. This property also applies to the panel's availability.

Panels are not transparent. Therefore, their color can be changed to control their background display. A panel is a complete control with properties, methods, and events.

To add a panel to a container, you can click the Panel button from the Toolbox and click the desired location on the container. Unlike the form, during design, a panel must primarily be positioned on another container which would be a form or another panel.

To programmatically create a panel, declare a handle to Panel, allocate memory for it using the new operator, and add it to its parent. Here is an example:

Imports System.Drawing
Imports System.Windows.Forms

Module Exercise

    Public Class Starter
        Inherits Form

        Private pnlContainer As Panel

        Dim components As System.ComponentModel.Container

        Public Sub New()
            InitializeComponent()
        End Sub

        Public Sub InitializeComponent()

            Text = "Domain Configuration"
            Width = 320
            Height = 210
            Location = New Point(140, 100)
            StartPosition = FormStartPosition.CenterScreen

            pnlContainer = New Panel()
            pnlContainer.Location = Point(20, 20)
            pnlContainer.Size = New Size(100, 60)
            Controls.Add(pnlContainer)

        End Sub

    End Class

    Function Main() As Integer

        Dim frmStart As Starter = New Starter

        Application.Run(frmStart)

        Return 0
    End Function

End Module

By default, a panel object is drawn without borders. If you want to add borders to it, use the BorderStyle property. It provides three values that you can set in the Properties window: None, FixedSingle, and Fixed3D and their effects are as follows:

	None	FixedSingle	Fixed3D
Design
Run

To programmatically specify the border style, assign the desired value to the Panel.BorderStyle property. Here is an example:

Public Sub InitializeComponent()
    Text = "Domain Configuration"
    Width = 320
    Height = 210
    Location = New Point(140, 100)
    StartPosition = FormStartPosition.CenterScreen

    pnlContainer = New Panel()
    pnlContainer.Location = New Point(20, 20)
    pnlContainer.Size = New Size(100, 60)

    pnlContainer.BorderStyle = BorderStyle.Fixed3D

    Controls.Add(pnlContainer)
End Sub

A panel can be used as a button, in which case the user would click it to initiate an action.

A property that is highly used on panels (and forms) is the Color. If you change the BackColor property, the new color would cover the face of the panel.