Before jumping into the lesson, however, another point was illustrated - accidentally - by the book. The use of standard terminology is important. On page 395 in the first chapter of this three chapter set on Forms (chapter 15, Managing Windows Forms), the book defines dialog box as, "a form that mustbe addressed when it's displayed on the screen". This type of form was called a "modal form" in VB 6. In this chapter, however, the first example form is called a Dialog Box, but it's never used as a dialog box by being displayed using the ShowDialog method - explained in chapter 15. In fact, when a real dialog box is needed (the InputBox isa type of dialog box) on page 455, this form isn't used! There's another reason for that which will be explained below.
In my experience, a lot of errors are caused by the simple lack of precise communication - especially in team programming on larger systems. If something is called a dialog box, it should be a dialog box.
Although the concept of forms inheritance is explained really well in the book on pages 439 to 445, there is one thing that is still missing! You have to read the chapter very carefully to pick out the one clue about it on the bottom of page 442. In parenthesis, the book notes ...
"If you want to inherit a form that isn't a component in the current project, the form just be compiled as a .DLL file."
