Of Hacks and Keyboards...

I am not sure if I missed something or not, but I am completely surprised at this conversation about being notified when a tab changes in a TabControl. I am surprised that no one has mentioned TabIndexChanged event or, if you are working on a platform that does not support that event (such as Windows CE), the SelectedIndexChanged event.

But what is even more surprising to me is that, not only did someone suggest setting up a mouse event handler to be notified when the user selects the tab, the original author had actually tried it! Fortunately, it seems that this does not work.

From a usability perspective, what about the keyboard? While most people use a mouse for selecting tabs, some people use the keyboard, and depending on what happens when the event occurs, the user experience of the keyboard user would be different than that of the mouse user. Debugging this over e-mail could be rather amusing, to say the least.

When creating hacks, you have to consider the cases for which the hack would not work, and in a user-interface, the inability to use the keyboard is definitely something that should be avoided, especially when a little further research would provide the desired and correct behaviour with minimal effort as the case above. Unfortunately, sometimes this is not the case, and for these cases, the caveats must be minimized and well understood and documented. Based on the discussion, I do not believe that this was the case for this particular issue.