Tiled or Cascaded?
When multiple MDI child forms are open, they can be sized and moved within the parent’s client area. You can also arrange them automatically in specific ways:
- Cascaded. Forms are overlapped, sort of like card players typically hold a playing hand, with each form’s title bar visible.
- Tiled. Forms don’t overlap and instead are sized to fill the entire client area. Tiling can be either vertical or horizontal.
Automatic form arrangement is accomplished with the LayoutMdi method of the parent form. You pass one of the following MdiLayout enumeration arguments to specify the desired arrangement of child forms:
- Cascade
- TileHorizontal
- TileVertical
A fourth argument, ArrangeIcons, lets you arrange the icons representing minimized child forms.
Traditionally, the various tile and cascade commands are placed on the application’s Window menu.