Application Development Using Visual Basic and .NET By Robert J. Oberg, Peter Thorsteinson, Dana L. Wyatt
Table of Contents
Part 5. Advanced UI Programming Using VB.NET
Chapter 12. Advanced Windows Forms
The System.Windows.Forms namespace is a collection of classes that can be used to build sophisticated Windows applications. We've already seen that it contains a collection of control classes such as Textbox , ListBox , DateTimePicker , MainMenu , and ToolBar . This chapter focuses less on the controls and more on the interesting uses of the Windows Forms classes. We have already discussed how to use modal dialogs; in this chapter we discuss modeless dialogs. These dialogs can remain visible while the user interacts with other windows. We will also look at MDI applications. These applications allow us to display child forms within the context of a parent form. The parent form can manage the display of these child forms. We will also examine an interesting new feature of the .NET Windows Forms architecture: visual inheritance. Using visual inheritance, we can build new forms from existing ones. We conclude this chapter by discussing how ActiveX controls can be used within VB.NET applications.
