I don't have a book to recommend, but I can give you my general rules.

 1) A form has a limited number of controls that can actually be on it. (I 
don't know the limit off hand). Use a control to wrap controls when you 
have too many for the form. This way it sees your wrapper as one control 
rather than 30.
 2) When you want to re-use functionality. E.g. I have many text boxes 
that I want to all perform the same way. (I want them to handle Nulls this 
way, etc.)
 3) The best reason to use controls. I am abstracting viewing of data in 
my application. I can then have the controls implement one set of calls 
that will be generic for the displaying, saving, refreshing, of data. This 
way the shell app only has to know what control to dynamically create for 
the data that is desired. Then the control can deal with displaying it.
 4) I want to re-use the display of data. I want this type of data to be 
viewable/editable in many different places in my application. By have a 
control that does this, you only have to write the handling of the data 
once.
 5) ActiveX controls can be part of a web page. (I never do this 
personally, but it is a reason to use controls.) If you use controls for 
your exe, then you could mount the control in a web page.



> Hi List

Will someone please recommend a book that outlines the best practices with
regards to creating user controls, when to use, when not to use, user
controls vs forms etc

Thanks in advance
Mark Warner

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