Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET 2003 Kick Start

Working with Multiple Forms in VB .NET

The previous section described a major change in the forms model from VB6 to VB .NET—the removal of default form instances. This is not a major technical problem; programmers (including VB6 programmers) have been working without default instances of non-form classes for a very long time, but it is a big change if you are used to building Windows applications using VB6. The result of this change is that you need a reference to a particular instance of a form to be able to use it. I will start with a very simple example to illustrate the concept. I will create a new Windows application that contains two forms. Form1, which will be shown automatically when the project runs, will create and display an instance ...