>I do want to set "areas" of the form appart, and sort of group them. But really only visually, not necessarily for any programatic reason, and I've looked at Groupbox, Panel, etc. It appears that when you attempt to draw these controls on the form they automatically "capture" the existing controls that are within their borders.

Yes, both panels and groupboxes are container controls, however, the controls contained in them are still members of the form (unlike controls on a UserControl, which are members of that UserControl). I use groupboxes all the time to group stuff visually on my forms.

>What do you prefer to use to draw lines? I have a group of numbers that I'd like to draw a line across to set appart the titles of the columns (I'm not using a grid for these numbers as they represent totals not rows in a child table.

I've not had the pleasure of needing to draw lines <g> ... but in playing around with it for a few minutes, it looks like it's pretty painless to make a Panel into a line (you'd want to set the BorderStyle property to FixedSingle and set the Height to 1 or 2).

>Also, one of the problems I am encountering is that I have a gradient background on these forms and that makes drawing any box more challenging.

Yeah, it would ... I don't know if Einar's suggestion to use GDI will help out there or not ... I've not used it, so I can't really say.

~~Bonnie


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>bob
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>>>2 quick questions:
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>>>How do you draw lines on a winform? Can you draw 3d boxes on a winform?
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>>>I'm coming from FoxPro and we had lines and containers...
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>>I think I'd need to know exactly what you want to accomplish.
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>>Do you want boxes just to make things appear to group together? .Net has GroupBoxes for that.
>>.NET has container controls as well (UserControl)
>>There are also Panels and splitters.
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>>So, what do you want to do?
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>>~~Bonnie