Show and Hide tab pages in Windows Forms

It seems a lot of people believe it is not possible to show and hide a TabPage in a TabControl on a windows form. This is not that surprising since the Show and Hide methods of the TabPage class do nothing whatsoever.

If you refer to the MSDN documentation about the TabPage class, it states the following:

Hence the correct way to hide and show a tab using code is shown below.

private System.Windows.Forms.TabControl _tabControl;
private System.Windows.Forms.TabPage _tabPage1;
private System.Windows.Forms.TabPage _tabPage2;

...

// Initialise the controls

...

// "hides" tab page 2
_tabControl.TabPages.Remove(_tabPage2);

// "shows" tab page 2
if (_tabControl.TabPages.Contains(_tabPage2))
{
    _tabControl.TabPages.Add(_tabPage2);
}

The last TabPage added to the TabPages collection will be displayed last, so if you are hiding and showing multiple tabs you might also want to put in some code to make sure the tabs are in the right order. I simply remove all the tabs first, before adding them again as shown below.

// Suspend and resume layout to avoid flickering.
_tabControl.SuspendLayout();
_tabControl.TabPages.Clear();
_tabControl.TabPages.Add(_tabPage1);
_tabControl.TabPages.Add(_tabPage2);
_tabControl.ResumeLayout();