Add Close button in Tab Pages Header

Assuming this is Windows Forms.

The choices you have with the MS TabControl are very limited: if you want any type of customization of the Tab-Headers, you must make the control OwnerDrawn, and implement custom painting. And, if you want hit-detection inside the Tab-Headers, you must implement that.

That said, you can find really nice examples of OwnerDrawn TabControls with custom Tab-Headers, such as the one here on CP that Ravi referred you to in his post.

Here's an alternative I wrote a few years ago before I switched over to using a 3rd. party TabControl (in the Lidor IntegralUI Suite).

This alternative uses a ContextMenu, which ... for this example ... I'll limit to a single menu-entry: "Close."

1. you may wish to set the TabControl SizeMode to 'Fixed, and set the 'ItemSize parameters to make the Tab-Headers the size you wish.

2. drop a ContextMenuStrip on the Form, create a single menu-item with the text "Close."

3. set the TabControl to use the ContextMenuStrip.

4. double-click on the "Close" menu item to generate a Click EventHandler for the ToolStripMenuItem, and code it like this:

private void closeToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    Point mouseAt = MousePosition;

    foreach (TabPage theTabPage in tabControl1.TabPages)
    {
        if (tabControl1.RectangleToScreen(tabControl1.GetTabRect(theTabPage.TabIndex)).Contains(mouseAt))
        {
            // for testing only
            Console.WriteLine(theTabPage.Text + Environment.NewLine);

            // this is where you'd write code to remove the TabPage
            // from the TabControl's TabPages collection which is
            // the only way you can simulate "closing" it

            break;
        }
    }
}

What's going on here:

1. when the ToolStripMenuItem is Clicked the mouse position in screen co-ordinates is recorded.

2. the TabPages in the TabControl are iterated over, and the Tab-Header bounds are translated into screen co-ordinates.

3. the translated Tab-Header bounds are tested to see if they contain the point the mouse went down at.

4. if the hit is detected: for testing purposes: a message is written to the Console to display the Text of that TabPage, and the iteration is halted.

Disclaimer: I haven't used this code in a while, and you should thoroughly test the hit-detection yourself.