Form (programming)

In component-based programming (Visual Basic, .NET WinForms, and Delphi), a form is an easy way to create a GUI window. A form contains components and controls, which are a high-level representation of standard GUI widgets; it's easier to manipulate the high-level wrappers than to deal with the underlying API.

At design time, visual controls (buttons, text boxes, and the like) and non-visual components (timers, database connections, and so on) are placed on the form. These controls and components are moved and sized with a mouse, and their properties and event handlers are set with a special grid.

At runtime, automatically generated code creates instances of these controls and components, and sets their properties.

See also