Visual Basic 2012 Programmer's Reference

PROPERTIES ADOPTED BY CHILD CONTROLS

Some properties are adopted by many of the child controls contained in a parent control or in a form. For example, by default, a Label control uses the same background color as the form that contains it. If you change the form’s BackColor property, its Label controls change to display the same color. Similarly if a GroupBox contains a Label and you change the GroupBox’s BackColor property, its Label changes to match.

Some properties adopted by a form’s controls include BackColor, ContextMenu, Cursor, Enabled, Font, and ForeColor. Not all controls use all of these properties, however. For example, a TextBox only matches its form’s Enabled and Font properties.

If you explicitly set one of these properties for a control, its value takes precedence over the form’s settings. For example, if you set a Label control’s BackColor property to red, the control keeps its red background even if you change the Form’s BackColor property.

Some of these properties are also not tremendously useful to the Form object itself, but they give guidance to the form’s controls. For example, a form doesn’t automatically display text on its surface, so it never really uses its Font property. Its Label, TextBox, ComboBox, List, RadioButton, CheckBox, and many other controls adopt the value of this property, however, so the form’s Font property serves as a central location to define the font for all of these controls. If you change the form’s Font property, even at run time, ...