is there any way to force a control to receive focus?

I've never tried anything like this before and don't even know if it's possible, but i don't have time to try it right now and i thought i'd throw it out just in case it might actually work.

the Panel class doesn't seem to have a TabStop Property, so I was thinking, again, don't laugh if this isn't possibly, because it definitely might not be, but Panel inherits from the ScrollableControl which does have a TabStop property, maybe something like MyBase.MyBase.TabStop = True

I'm guess that won't work, which means I'm guess that it's not possible, but I'm sure there's somebody out there that knows more than me that could tell you how to do it.

might wanna look into it. Panel doesn't fire Enter or Leave...at least not for me.

Randy, can you be a little more crisp in defining your scenario? What exactly are you trying to do? Set focus to a control inside a Panel? Get a notification when a control inside a Panel recieves focus?

thanks
-mike

well, let's say i have a custom control derived from Panel that works just like the collapsing panels in winXP explorer..and let's say i have two of them on a form, when i switch from one to another i need to be able to handle the Leave() [for example] event and see if anything inside the control has changed, and if it has, write out changes to a file or database or whatever..the real scenario is the same idea, but with about 10 or 15 of these controls, and I'd write a generic handler that tested the sender...this make sense?

this is sort of the behavior im looking for..and this is how im doing it right now..but if they click in any area IN the panel im looking for it to raise the leave and enter's instead of them having to tab to or click into another control that is IN the panel...that make sense?

ie: if i had 3 panels with nothing in them, and they clicked back and forth between those panels i'd want the events raised.

Randy, from your problem description a few posts up, you said that you were looking for notification in order to do some validation on things that may have changed inside the Panel.

If this is the case, shouldn't you have at least one control in there that the user can interact with, and therefore, have focus? If you don't have a control that can take focus in there, what could change that you'd need to do work based on?

thanks
- mike

FWIW - you might want to also look at the Validating / Validated events. But I think they are closely tied to Enter and Leave for when they are raised

thanks for the help mark, but here's a thought..is that going to force the control to focus and throw an Enter event everytime a user clicks? or just once? ...im not at home so i dont have vs.net to test that on..

Mike -- actually yes, originally when i posted that your solution would work..but heres another one (again im not near vs.net so i cant test this) but if you have two panels inside that panel, with controls on those panels and let's say a splitter in between them..would the Enter circulate all the way up to the top? but once i started thinking about it, in the XP style collapsing panel for example..the collapse/expand is drawn simply using DrawIcon() and checking the MouseDown to see if its "hot" ..there are situations where i might have an empty windowpane (eventually the class may support dragging and dropping items between panels, and they could possibly get all of the items off of a particular panel..)