Win Forms is the new platform for Microsoft Windows application development, based on the NGWS frameworks. The NGWS frameworks provide a clear, object-oriented, extensible set of classes that enable you to develop rich Windows applications. Additionally, Win Forms can act as the local user interface in a multi-tier distributed solution.
A form is a bit of screen real estate, usually rectangular, that you can use to present information to the user and to accept input from the user. Forms can be standard windows, multiple document interface (MDI) windows, dialog boxes, or display surfaces for graphical routines. The easiest way to define the user interface for a form is to place controls on its surface. Forms are objects that expose properties which define their appearance, methods which define their behavior, and events which define their interaction with the user. By setting the properties of the form and writing code to respond to its events, you customize the object to meet the requirements of your application.
As with all objects in the NGWS frameworks, forms are instances of classes. The Win Form you create with the designer is a class, and when you display an instance of the form at run time, this class is the template used to create the form. The framework also allows you to inherit from existing forms to add functionality or modify existing behavior. When you add a form to your project, you can choose whether it inherits from the Form
class provided by the framework, or from a form you've previously created.
Within a Win Forms project, the form is the primary vehicle for user interaction. By combining different sets of controls and writing code, you can elicit information from the user and respond to it, work with existing stores of data, and query and write back to the file system and Registry on the user’s local computer.
Anatomy of the Visual Basic Code behind a Win Form | Displaying Win Forms in the Designer | Win Forms as the Presentation Tier of a 3-Tier Application | Dialog Boxes | Controls and Win Forms in the Technology Preview