Several options here:
- Use the
Document Outline
view (View --> Other Windows --> Document Outline
) to select the panel you care about. You can right-click on it and chooseBring to Front
to put it in front of everything else. - Though it’s probably not relevant to what you’re doing, you might consider using a
TabControl
, which you can mess with visually at design time. This is only a reasonable solution if you want your users to be able to manually change which panel they’re viewing. - Consider moving your panels into custom
UserControl
classes and work on them separately. If the content and logic of these panels is reasonably self-contained then you may want to do this anyway just to better restructure your code.
Addendum: You can also use a hack that makes a TabControl
‘s tabs invisible to the user. Put a TabControl
on your form, and at run-time set the ItemSize
height to 1. This makes it (almost) impossible for the user to change the tabs on their own, but still allows you to change the visible tab in the designer.
myTabControl.ItemSize = new Size(myTabControl.ItemSize.Width, 1);
Note that I called this a hack for a reason: TabControl
s were not meant to be used this way. It’s something that appears to work, but like all hacks it may break at any time so you should only do it as a last resort (and don’t blame me if it causes headaches later on…). In short, I do not recommend this hack, I only offer it as a possibility.