Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Visual Inheritance

After all the settings and behavior and layout details you've learned to pack into forms in this chapter, you may decide that you'd like to keep some of your hard work in a Form-derived base class for easy reuse by further derivations, and you can certainly do that. If you follow the convention that forms initialize their own properties and the properties of their child controls in a function called InitializeComponent, the Designer provides direct support for your visual inheritance: the reuse of a form base class via inheritance.

The goal of visual inheritance is to allow a base class to capture common UI elements, which are then shared and augmented by deriving classes. For example, imagine a BaseForm class that derives ...