repaint Tab-Control empty Tab Space - winforms

In WinForms, how do I repaint the empty area that contains empty tab space to be filled by new tabs in a color of my choice?

I don't think you can in winforms. The tabcontrol background property (as opposed to tabpage background) might do it.
Of course, it's worth mentioning that you can style anything in WPF, if you end up going that way.

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WPF ListBox does not realise that its items have changed size

I have a ListBox that contains a number of User items that are DataTemplated to appear as UserControls in the ListBox. Each UserControl can be expanded in size. To start with, the ListBox is big enough to display them all in their unexpanded state. The problem that I have is that when a number of these UserControls are expanded together, they extend out of the ListBox's visible area. The ListBox does not recognise this fact and no ScrollBars appear, even when they are set to Visible.
I am using DoubleAnimations to alter the UserControl heights when the user clicks on a button in each one. Is there something that I have to do, or some setting on the ListBox that must be set to get it to register the size changes of the UserControls that represent its items and display ScrollBars when needed?
Edit>>>
I have tracked down the problem to a custom WrapPanel that I am using in the ListBox.ItemsPanel. When I remove it, or replace it with a standard WrapPanel, ScrollBars appear when required. I got the code for the Panel from a good article about creating custom WPF panels. Can anyone see what's missing from the code given in the article and why it might stop the ScrollBars from displaying?
I wonder whether ListBoxes normally do what you are expecting? You might try calling InvalidateMeasure/Layout on the ListBox if you know when the item sizes change, just to see?
I decided to write the custom WrapPanel code again completely and this time it worked correctly! When comparing the new version with the previous version, I could see that a + was missing from a += in a measuring calculation and so the Panel thought that the items were much smaller than they really were... hence no ScrollBars.
So, if you have this problem, check your measuring code carefully.

Is it possible for WinForm controls (Panel,etc.) to grow like a webform control?

I'm converting an app from ASP.NET WebForms to WinForms. There is one asp.net page which contains a ListView/Repeater that contains several custom controls, which in turn contain a ListView with other custom controls. Basically the layout looks like a TreeView, but on each node/leaf there are few controls like comboboxes, etc.
When this is in ASP.NET, the page automatically lays itself out, so it is several screens tall - if I add 20 buttons into a Panel, it will grow and the browser will get scrollbars.
I'd like to do the same thing in a WinForms application - so I'll have a user control that will contain a lot of controls in a some variation of Panel (Flow, Table layout), and the controls might have another controls inside them, etc.
The problem is, that when I make winforms app, each control has specific height in the design time. I'd like some user controls to be able to grow with their contents - so they'll add up. In the main Form, there should be a vertical scrollbar, just like in the web browser when the generated page is taller than the screen.
I'd just like to get some general pointers in the right direction. Thanks.
Use Anchor and Dock container properties.
Yes, to expound on Anchor and Dock...try this
-Place a Panel on an empty form, and set its dock property to Top
-place a textbox in the panel, and Dock it to Full...it should fill the whole top panel
-Place a splitter on the form, and if not already docked correctly, set its dock to top
-place another panel below the splitter, and set its Dock to Fill
-place another textbox inside the lower panel and fill it as as well
Now you have a form with two resiable textboxes and will resize when the form does.
*you may have to set the textbox MultiLine property to true but not sure.
Hope this helps.
Anchor the controls to the parent. Anchoring all four sides will cause it to stretch.
If the Anchoring and Docking answers don't work for you, there is another option. It's not pretty, but you can access a control's properties and change them dynamically during runtime. You'd do something like: if(listBox.Items.Count > [yourVal]) listBox.height = [yourFormula] or something.
It's been a while since I've done a Win Form (and I don't have my IDE fired up at the moment) but I'm pretty sure there's even a ScrollPanel or other scrolling control that you can set on your form.
That said, when you're working with WinForms, the less scrolling you can make your users do, the better.

How can I animate show/hide of an item in an ItemsControl, but only animate if the window is already visible?

I have an ItemsControl with a number of elements, each one with its own ViewModel instance. Each item's ViewModel knows whether that item should be visible (currently each ViewModel has a Visibility property that the UI binds to). When my window first opens, some of these items are visible, others are collapsed. Later, some items' visibility might change in response to user interaction. The window sizes to its content, so the window resizes when items are shown or hidden. And the window is initially centered on the screen (which means everything has to be arranged properly right away, so the window knows its initial size and can center itself accordingly).
Now I want to add animations whenever an item is shown or hidden -- but I only want to animate if the item's visibility changes after the window is already shown. So if the window is already open, and the user does something that makes one of the ViewModels want to appear, it animates in; if the user does something to make one of the ViewModels disappear, it animates out. But when the window first opens, I want everything to start out rock-solid -- no lingering animations.
And I want the window to still set its initial size based on its initially-visible content, and I still want it to be initially centered onscreen. (Although actually, in this case, it would be acceptable if it centered itself as if all items were visible, if event ordering made it work out that way.)
I know a fair bit about WPF, but I admit I'm lost when it comes to triggers and storyboards. I haven't really done anything with WPF animations before, and I'm not sure where to begin.
I already tried using Reveal from the Bag of Tricks, but I had several problems with it, the biggest being that it doesn't have the "only use animations after the window is shown" behavior that I want -- my window would appear and the initially-visible elements would still be animating in. It also didn't play well with my layout (it was centering the elements horizontally, instead of stretching them to the ItemsControl's width), and a few other problems that might or might not be fixable.
I'm not too picky about whether I animate by stretching (e.g. by animating a LayoutTransform from SizeX=1 SizeY=0 to SizeX=1 SizeY=1, thus starting with squished text and expanding to normal size) or by just changing the Height (thus starting with only part of the content visible and revealing more as the animation progresses) -- I'm fine with either.
I'm open to writing my own Panel descendant (I've done it before) if that's the best way to solve this, and I can always steal code from Reveal and hack until I get it working -- but it seems like there should already be an easier way to do this, if I just knew what it was. I'm open to learning about triggers and storyboards, or whatever, if someone can point me in the right direction.

Removing Blue Border around treeviewitem in Expression Blend

I'm building a silverlight app in Blend that will contain a treeview and treeviewitems. The contents of my treeviewitems all have a blue border (when clicked and when you hover the mouse over), as you can see in the image I linked to. I cannot figure out what causes that border, or how to remove it; anyone know where to get at it? I've tried looking in the various treeview related templates, but I've had no luck so far.
I think what you are seeing here is the FocusVisual:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.frameworkelement.focusvisualstyle.aspx
If you set this to {x:Null} (via FocusVisualStyle), it should go away...if not, you're likely dealing with a "selected" VisualState, in which case your best option is to override the template to remove that particular state.

Control focus styling

in above image you would notice that, doted rectangle indicating ComboBox is focused
But the problem is it exceeding the text area of ComboBox... how do I align it with text area WPF Style?
Thanks
Without seeing your ControlTemplate it's difficult to give the best way to change it.
One slightly hackish way to do it is set Focusable on the ComboBox to False and then set Focusable on the TextBlock (or Label) to True. This should make it so the TextBlock gets focus whenever the ComboBox should.
My best guess though is that you have some weird margins going on, the real way to fix it would be to straighten those out.

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