We are building a multipane C# winform application with three panes. The anchored left pane will be the menu, center pane data entry, and right pane advisory information. The customer has requested there be only ONE scrollbar per page. IOW, if the menu needs to scroll, it will use the single scrollbar anchored on the right and all three panes will scroll. Same with the data pane... meaning if it needs to scroll the menu pane will scroll out of site.
I am wondering if anyone has doen something like this and what your thoughts are? Most applications I have seen, such as Microsoft Outlook, use separate scroll bars per pane for this.
I would like thoughts on this approach (pro and con), including guestimatees on level of difficulty.
For a WinForm app, yeah, I'd say having distinct scrollbars is more common. Sounds like they want it to act like a browser, but that seems a bit odd to me. Even in a browser, panes (if they're visible as panes and not just layout sections) tend to have their own scrollbars.
I'm not an expert in WinForms dev, but I'd guess neither would pose any particular challenge or, if so, the single scrollbar might be more troublesome.