First off, I like the look of it.  It has "Category" in a nice bar above the "work area"

Second, how is the work area being loaded?  I can't figure out what container it is.

Here is what I am looking to do.

I would to be able to load usercontrols into the "work area".  I have seen samples of doing this but the samples seem to assume that the usercontrol is already loaded onto the form.  If I load them, how do I do it so that the usercontrol doesn't show unless I add it to the container?

I have a main page that has a left nav and a work area on the right side.  The work area could have 1 of 4 usercontrols displayed.  All 4 controls are heavy with data so I don't want them to draw or pull from the database until they are called for by the user.  Then when the user calls for them, the current usercontrol is removed/hidden and the called control is displayed and pulls the data from the database.

I hope that this post makes sense.  I would be grateful for any assistance.

Shawn

Thanks, I did go through that Wiki article which lead to http://www.visualwebgui.com/Developers/KB/tabid/654/article/working_with_usercontrols_to_simulate_frames/Default.aspx

The sample project had too many errors when i tried to load it in vs2010 VWG 4 so I just gave up.  Even if you can't give me code can you explain the concept of how to do it?

Also, does the UserControl need to be a part of the VWG project or can it be part of a VWG library project?  Does it matter if it is in a library project?

One last thing.  The usercontrol would have to interact alot with the form that contains it.  How do you do the event handling in the main form if the user control is being swapped in?

As I have said before, I am new to .net and to VWG.  The application that I am building is for a rewrite of an existing asp classic application that is of a pretty good size.  I don't have the luxury of time in the rewrite so please understand why I am posting questions like a mad man !

Thanks,

Shawn

----- Update 5:35pm ------

I have made it work but I am afraid that I am missing something because it is reatively simple.

On my form I have a panel (panel1)

I have created a user control (usercontrol1)

In the main form is a button with a click event.  That event looks like this:

   Private Sub Button1_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button1.Click
        Me.Panel1.Controls.Clear()
        Me.Panel1.Controls.Add(oControl)
        oControl.MyTest = "help me"
        oControl.LoadMe()
    End Sub

    Private Sub Button2_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Button2.Click
        Me.Panel1.Controls.Clear()
        Me.Panel1.Controls.Add(oControl2)
    End Sub

The control is dimmed at the class level with this code

Dim oControl As New UserControl1

Dim oControl2 As New UserControl2

I did this so that I could interact with the control throughout the life of the form.

2 questions remain:

1.  Is this a good approach?  Or am I asking for trouble with this simple approach?  I am planning on less then 5 user controls that would be handled like this (those controls will have a number of controls within them).  Each of these controls will be loading alot of data.  What data will be based off information passed to the usercontrols from the main form so I will have some sort of loaddata function in the usercontrol. 

2.  How do I handle events in the usercontrol so that they will kick off functions in the main form?

Thanks for any insight.

Shawn

Thanks for the help!

I use VB.net

I believe I understand the concepts you speak of and the sample app does work now, Thanks.

When you talk about the overridable public methods... Here are my questions:

1.  how do I reference the methods on base control?  Lets say that the base control is called base1.  So lets say that I want to do a me.base1.SetMyText = "test" (SetMyText is the overrideable method)

2. Now, if I do a SetFrame(new base2) to load a new control, how do I reference the new control so I could use .SetMyText?

Thanks

Shawn