Hi Simon,

I'm glad that Kevin jumped in here to help you with your questions (I was away for the weekend) ... as he mentioned, it *does* depend on what you're doing, but in general, delayed instantiation is a good thing. We don't use tabbed pages but we're using a third-party tool that has the look-and-feel of Outlook's SideBars. Clicking on an item in the SideBar brings up different control's in the right-hand panel of the form. We use lots of UserControls and instantiate them in the panel only when SideBar item is clicked ... this is a good example of using delayed instantiation I think (and doing a similar thing when using tabbed pages would be the way to go, IMHO).

~~Bonnie