This article is a part of Form Concepts series of articles.

UserControls are containers, like forms, and behave very similar to forms. They have component tray, where you can drop your DataSets and BindingSources and in the Visual WebGui designer, they are allmost identidal as forms to design. In fact they are so similar, that you can simply edit the code files and change the inheritance from Form to UserControl to make that Form a UserControl and vice versa.

Many users prefer UserControls to MDI implementation for their applications. The trick is to design your UserControl just like you would do with any form, and then dynamically create an instance if that UserControl and place it within a Panel or TabPage and even inside other UserControls.

UserControls are also very handy to simulate IFRAMEs in a Visual WebGui application, for those coming from the Web programming world. See the codesample on simulating IFRAMEs.

• Working with UserControls to simulate frames