Dynamically creation of Menustrip in vb.net

As the OP has tried Solution 1 and is having some problems here's my twopennorth...

I created a Windows Forms application in VB.NET where the only control on the Form is an "empty" MenuStrip - i.e. no menu items added via the Designer

I decided to hold my Menu definitions in an XML document ... the style of XML lends itself nicely to a menu structure and an XML document can be populated in a variety of ways. For the purposes of this example I just stored the data in a text document which I just load

Private Function GetMenus() As XmlDocument
    'This would be replaced with extracting the data from a database or similar
    'For demo/testing I'm just loading a fixed xml document
    Dim xxml As XmlDocument = New XmlDocument()
    xxml.Load("c:\\temp\\SampleData.xml")
    Return xxml
End Function

This is the XML I used - I hope I've explained it well enough

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--
layout here is TopLevel node has attribute 'text' which is the text for that menu item
Any sub-menus are in the NextLevel nodes which also have the 'text' attribute
NextLevel has InnerText set to the name of the function to call
If there are no NextLevel Nodes then the TopLevel node has InnerText set to the name of the function to call
-->
<Menus>
  <TopLevel text="Menu 1">
    <NextLevel text="Menu 1.A">Menu1A</NextLevel>
    <NextLevel text="Menu 1.B">Menu1B</NextLevel>
    <NextLevel text="Menu 1.C">Menu1C</NextLevel>
  </TopLevel>
  <TopLevel text="Menu 2">Menu2</TopLevel>
  <TopLevel text="Menu 3">
    <NextLevel text="Menu 3.A">Menu3A</NextLevel>
    <NextLevel text="Menu 3.B">Menu3B</NextLevel>
  </TopLevel>
</Menus>

Which represents a menu structure like this

Menu 1				Menu 2		Menu 3
	Menu 1.A					Menu 3.A
	Menu 1.B					Menu 3.B
	Menu 1.C

In the link in Solution 1 the Author has used a nice trick to determine which Form to load. I've opted to use Reflection to work out which function to call.

The key is to have all of the routines that could be called from the menus in a simple class.
Here's the one I used

''' <summary>
''' Class DynamicMenuSubs contains all of the menu handlers for dynamically generated menus
''' </summary>
Public Class DynamicMenuSubs
    Public Sub Menu1A()
        Debug.Print("Called Menu1A")
    End Sub
    Public Sub Menu1B()
        Debug.Print("Called Menu1B")
    End Sub
    Public Sub Menu1C()
        Debug.Print("Called Menu1C")
    End Sub
    Public Sub Menu2()
        Debug.Print("Called Menu2")
    End Sub
    Public Sub Menu3A()
        Debug.Print("Called Menu3A")
    End Sub
    Public Sub Menu3B()
        Debug.Print("Called Menu3B")
    End Sub
End Class

Note that the Sub names match (exactly) to the InnerText in the XML above.

Because I only want to visit the database (or XML) once I decided to store the name of the function to call as the Tag of each MenuItem, so here is my code for creating the menus

Private Sub BuildMenus()

    Dim xxml As XmlDocument = GetMenus()

    Dim toplevels As XmlNodeList = xxml.SelectNodes("Menus/TopLevel")
    Dim node As XmlNode
    'Top level menus
    For Each node In toplevels
        Dim tsmi As New ToolStripMenuItem
        tsmi.Text = node.Attributes("text").Value
        Dim sublevels As XmlNodeList = node.SelectNodes("NextLevel")
        If sublevels.Count = 0 Then
            'No sub-menus therefore set the tag of this menuitem to the function name
            tsmi.Tag = node.InnerText
            AddHandler tsmi.Click, AddressOf DynamicMenuHandler
        Else
            Dim subnode As XmlNode
            For Each subnode In sublevels
                Dim ddi As New ToolStripMenuItem
                ddi.Text = subnode.Attributes("text").Value
                ddi.Tag = subnode.InnerText
                AddHandler ddi.Click, AddressOf DynamicMenuHandler
                tsmi.DropDownItems.Add(ddi)
            Next
        End If
        MenuStrip1.Items.Add(tsmi)
    Next
End Sub

A key feature here is that all of the menu items have the same handler for the click event - whether they are top level items or sub-menu items. I called the BuildMenus function from the Form Load event

Here is that handler

Private Sub DynamicMenuHandler(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs)
    Dim s1 As ToolStripMenuItem = DirectCast(sender, ToolStripMenuItem)

    'Use Reflection to invoke the named function
    If s1.Tag.ToString.Length > 0 Then
        Dim SubType As System.Type = GetType(DynamicMenuSubs)
        Dim SubInfo As System.Reflection.MethodInfo = SubType.GetMethod(s1.Tag.ToString())
        Dim SubController As New DynamicMenuSubs
        SubInfo.Invoke(SubController, Nothing)
    End If

End Sub

[EDIT]I've finally re-found the source for the idea of having the functions in a separate controller class. Credit for that idea (on which this solution hinges) is due to Joris Bijvoets[^] I can't find his original article but the solution on the link details most of it [/EDIT]

FavouritesToolStripMenuItem1.DropDownItems.Add("New Test")