MainMenu Class

The MainMenu control represents the container for the menu structure of a form. A menu is composed of MenuItem objects that represent the individual menu commands in the menu structure. Each MenuItem can be a command for your application or a parent menu for other submenu items. To bind the MainMenu to the Form that will display it, assign the MainMenu to the Menu property of the Form.

For applications that will have support for multiple languages, you can use the RightToLeft property to display the text of the menu from right to left to support languages such as Arabic.

You can create different MainMenu objects to represent different menu structures for your form. If you want to reuse the menu structure contained in a specific MainMenu, you can use its CloneMenu method to create a copy. Once you have a copy of the menu structure, you can make the appropriate modifications for your new menu structure.

Note
Cutting and pasting menu items from one form to another in the designer might not work as expected if the form you are pasting into has no menu items defined.

The following code example creates a MainMenu, assigns two MenuItem objects to the MainMenu and binds it to a form. This example requires that you have a Form created that is named Form1.

public void CreateMyMainMenu()
{
   // Create an empty MainMenu.
   MainMenu mainMenu1 = new MainMenu();

   MenuItem menuItem1 = new MenuItem();
   MenuItem menuItem2 = new MenuItem();

   menuItem1.Text = "File";
   menuItem2.Text = "Edit";
   // Add two MenuItem objects to the MainMenu.
   mainMenu1.MenuItems.Add(menuItem1);
   mainMenu1.MenuItems.Add(menuItem2);

   // Bind the MainMenu to Form1.
   Menu = mainMenu1;   
}

.NET Framework

.NET Framework Client Profile

Windows 7, Windows Vista SP1 or later, Windows XP SP3, Windows XP SP2 x64 Edition, Windows Server 2008 (Server Core not supported), Windows Server 2008 R2 (Server Core supported with SP1 or later), Windows Server 2003 SP2

Reference

Other Resources