>In the Form Designer you can stack controls on a form and send them to the back or front using the format command.
>How is this done when defining a class programmatically to create a form object?

At design time, it's implied in the order of adding. The later added member objects have a higher z-order, and are displayed on top of other objects.

If you want to raise an object at runtime, you can

loObject.zorder(0)

Zero as a parameter pushes it all the way up, one all the way down - no fine control, but you can do thisform.lockscreen=.t., push back several controls in the order you want (the last goes lowest), then unlock the form.
Instead of loObject, you can have this., this.someobject, this.container.control etc.