Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Data Exchange

No matter what kind of form you've got, after you've created it, you need to get data into it and out of it. Although it is possible for a form to update an application's data directly when the user presses OK or Apply, this is generally considered bad practice for anything except the main form of your application. The problem is that changes in one part of the application might adversely affect your code. For this reason, forms should be as stand-alone as possible. This means that forms will have a set of properties that they manage, letting the client of the form populate the initial values of the properties and pulling out the final values as appropriate, just as you saw earlier in the typical usage of ColorDialog.

Because most ...