Tab menus are a fairly common thing that I use in a lot of my applications. I like tabs because they help break up large chunks of, usually, related information.

At work we use RadControls for Telerik and they have a pretty nice tab menu control that is easy to use and looks good too. The only problem with these controls is that they only work in WebForms like even the default ASP.NET controls. So when I started playing with MVC I quickly realized I would need to spend some time building some of these controls myself.

Sometimes we need to know the width of a given string in pixels, do you know how to compute it? Before writing some long code, please notice that the .NET framework class library provides such a method. When Googling about this issue, we find the Graphics.MeasureString Method, here is how to use it:

Graphics graphics = this.CreateGraphics();
SizeF textSize = graphics.MeasureString("How long am I?", this.Font);

Nice isn’t it? Well, there is one little problem here, how is the Graphics object created? The written code is a Windows Forms code, so the this is the Form itself. You can’t create the Graphics object by simply allocating it because…