Getting Started

Creating a wizard is simple with the Wizard control. Follow these steps to get started.

Option 1 - Creating a Form and Adding a Wizard

The first step in making a wizard is to create a Form for the wizard. Set the appropriate properties of the Form, such as FormBorderStyle and Text.

Place a Wizard control on the Form. Set its Dock property to Fill.

Option 2 - Creating a Form that Inherits WizardDialogForm

Alternatively, create a form that inherits the WizardDialogForm class. The WizardDialogForm already has a Wizard control built into it and exposes it as a property. It also takes all of the important Wizard events and provides methods that you can override to handle the events.

See the Wizard Dialog Form topic for more information on using a WizardDialogForm.

Configuring the Wizard Control

This list displays several of the most important properties to configure on the Wizard control:

Configuring a Wizard Renderer for Global Wizard Appearance

Each Wizard control must be assigned a WizardRenderer component to its Renderer property. The renderer draws all of the elements of the wizard. The default renderer assigned to a wizard is an instance of the WindowsClassicWizardRenderer class.

It has numerous properties for layout, colors, as well as for the setting the default background fills to each distinct element in the wizard. See the Working with Background Fills topic for more information on working with background fills. Essentially, all global appearance-related properties are found on the renderer. Some global default properties can be overwritten by page-specific properties found on the WizardPage class.

For complete customization, you can even create a class that inherits from WizardRenderer and overrides its various Draw methods. An instance of the custom renderer can then be assigned to the Wizard.Renderer property to replace the default renderer.

Changing Button Text

Each of the buttons' text can be modified by setting the appropriate property (i.e., NextButtonText property) on the Wizard control. You may wish to do this to switch from the normal button names or maybe because you are programming for a non-English language. In any event, Wizard also provides width properties (i.e., NextButtonWidth property) for each button so that you can change the width of each button to accommodate the width of the custom text.

Both of these types of properties are localizable so that you can store different values for different languages. See the Localization topic for more information on localization of properties.

These properties of the Wizard control relate to button text and width:

Configuring Button Appearance

By default, the buttons in the Wizard have a Windows Classic appearance. If you would like your buttons to have a different appearance, Wizard exposes several properties on the Wizard control that are useful.

The ButtonFlatStyle property sets the flat style of all buttons. With this, you can set its value to FlatStyle.System to allow the buttons to use system theme styles.

If not using themes for the buttons, you can set the background color of each button. The Wizard control exposes two special button events, ButtonMouseEnter and ButtonMouseLeave. You can attach to those and update the background color of the affected button to provide "hot" styles.

Adding Wizard Pages

After all of the above tasks have been completed, start adding wizard pages to your wizard. Use the design-time functionality of Wizard to add new pages. See the Design-Time Functionality topic for more information on how to add pages and navigate between them.