Controls

There are two differences between the controls and the Office ActiveX controls
1) windows form controls are implemented by extensible managed classes. Office controls are unmanaged
2) windows form controls have no concept of their location in relation to the containing workbook or document
You can use this.Controls collection to enumerate through all the controls

Toolbox

This window holds a list of controls that you can drag onto the forms. There are different sets of controls available, depending on the type of designer that is active, ie Windows Forms, Web Forms, XML document. If you wish to customise which tools are dipsplayed in the toolbox, or if you wish to add any additional .NET components, ActiveX controls or third party conttrols, click (Tools > Customise Toolbar)
There are several categories on the Toolbox

Docking of a control to the top, left, right or bottom of the container. You can also set the Dock property to DockStyle.Fill which will adjust the control to fill the container.

The Format menu allows you to:

• Lock the controls on a form

• Align selected controls with the primary control

• Resize controls to the dimensions of the control selected last

• Make equal, increase, decrease or rmeove the horizontal spacing between controls

Common Dialogs

ColorDialog
FileDialog
FontDialog
OpenFileDialog
PageSetupDialog
PrintDialog
PrintPreviewDialog
SaveFileDialog

(View > Tab Order)

If you set the Font property on a form, prior to adding any controls then all the controls will inherit the font style for the form
You can select all the controls using (Ctrl + "A")
You can lock the controls (Format > Lock Controls). This prevents any of the controls on the form being accidently moved.
(Format > Align)
Aligning controls is made a lot easier by having the grid on the form
The alignments and sizing options

Timer

This is an invisible stopwatch that gives you access to the system clock.
It can be used to count down from a preset time to cause a delay in a program or to repeat an action at prescribed intervals.
Although timer objects ate not visible at runtime, each timer is associated with an event procedure that runs every time the timer's preset interval has elapsed.

ActiveX Controls

You can easily expand the collection of controls that you have access to by loading ActiveX or COM controls.
When you add an ActiveX control to your Toolbox, Visual Studio displays them with the .NET controls and you can use them on your forms with few limitations. Visual Studio must create a wrapper for the control to enable it to be used in a .NET program.

FileOpenDialog

With dlgOpenFile 
   .CheckFileExists = True 
   .Filter = "Design Templates (*.pot)|*.pot" 

   If .ShowDialog = Windows.Forms.DialogResult.OK Then 
      txtTemplatePath.Text = .FileName 
   End If 
End With 

Me.tabMyTabControl.Controls.Find(key:="mytag", SearchAllChildren=True) 

In Visual Studio.NET, there are no drawing controls provided in the Toolbox. Instead you are encouraged to use GDI graphics services directly through the System.Drawing namespace.

bitmaps
icons

The System.Drawing namespace include numerous classes for creating graphics

Overloading Handlers

Private Sub Control_OnEvent() Handles Control1.OnEvent, Control2.OnEvent 

What is a Custom Control ?

no user interface

Positioning Controls

When you add controls to a windows form the default mode is GridLayout
They will be arranged using absolute positioning (x,y) corodinates

The other mode is FlowLayout
Here the controls are added top to bottom
The mode can be changed using the PageLayout property.

Setting Focus

txtTextBox.Select() 

KB - 822493

Me.ActiveControl = Me.txtMyTextbox 
Me.txtMyTextbox.Focus