Creating a tabbed layout

To accommodate more content in a window layout, tabbed user interfaces are mostly used. They allow users to open multiple pages in a single window. For example, most of the recent internet browsers use tabbed interface to let the user open multiple web pages simultaneously in a single window.

WPF provides TabControl to create the tabbed layout. In this recipe, we will learn the basics of tab interfaces, with a simple example to let you understand how it works.

Getting ready

To get started, make sure that you have opened Visual Studio IDE. Now create a new project named CH03.TabControlDemo, based on the available WPF application project template.

How to do it...

Let's create the UI interface to host a very basic tab control with a few tab items inside it. Perform the following steps:

1. From the Solution Explorer window, open the MainWindow.xaml file.
2. Inside the default Grid panel, add the TabControl with two TabItem controls as shown in the following code:

<Grid> 
  ...