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

(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

Common Controls

The base class is System.Windows.Forms.CommonControl
The derived classes are:
ColorDialog
OpenFileDialog
FolderBrowserDialog
SaveFileDialog
FontDialog
PageSetupDialog
PrintDialog

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.

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

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

Setting Focus

txtTextBox.Select() 

KB - 822493

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

Toolbox

(View > Toolbar)
(View > Other Windows > Toolbar)

Add a Windows form usercontrol
Add the reference System.Windows.FormsIntegration

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 remove the horizontal spacing between controls

Positioning

Positioning controls
(View > Other Windows > Toolbar)

Add a Windows form usercontrol
Add the reference System.Windows.FormsIntegration

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.

BindingNavigator

OpenFileDialog

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

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