Mastering Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 7. Working with Forms

In Visual Basic, the form is the container for all the controls that make up the user interface. When a Visual Basic application is executing, each window it displays on the desktop is a form. The terms form and window describe the same entity. A window is what the user sees on the desktop when the application is running. A form is the same entity at design time. The proper term is a Windows form, as opposed to a web form, but I will refer to them as forms. This term includes both the regular forms and dialog boxes, which are simple forms you use for very specific actions, such as to prompt the user for a particular piece of data or to display critical information. A dialog box is a form with a small number of controls, ...