What are the main difference between SF Standard Form and Maintenance Form? That is, can I get the same functionality that the Maintenance Form has by just dropping the maintenance form toolstrip on the SF Standardform.

Extract from the documentation: "The maintenance form toolstrip is a pre-engineered StrataFrame toolstrip that interacts with a StrataFrame form.  By simply dropping this toolstrip on to the form, add, edit, delete, and navigation features will automatically be implemented."

Or does the Maintenance Form have some other features that could be handy to have?

What I would like to do is to have a inhertitance as described in the picture. several areas each

The idea is that the application has one form (w_app_common). From that form each area in the application inherits a common form for that area (w_area1_common, w_area2_common etc) 

The "area common form" (w_area2_common) would be the base for two other forms.

The other (w_area_common_list) is used to display lists (no edit possibility) and
the other (w_area_common_crud) to show details and have the possibility to edit data.

Don't quite know if this type of approach is good in VB.Net... Comments are welcomed

Thanks for the help,

Kari

> What are the main difference between SF Standard Form and Maintenance Form? That is, can I get the same functionality that the Maintenance Form has by just dropping the maintenance form toolstrip on the SF Standardform.

Yes, the only difference between the StandardForm and the MaintenanceForm is the Toolstrip (and the GradientFormHeader that's been dropped on there as well).  In fact, the MaintenanceForm is only a template, not a separate class.

> Or does the Maintenance Form have some other features that could be handy to have?

All of the real functionality is built into the StandardForm itself.  When you click a button on the MaintenanceFormToolstrip, it just turns around and calls a method on the form (clicking "New" just calls Add() on the form).  The only thing you would be lacking is the Browse button, which is not part of the form itself, but you can easily create a button that calls ShowDialog on the BrowseDialog you dropped on the form.

> Don't quite know if this type of approach is good in VB.Net... Comments are welcomed

.NET is perfect for the inheritance you're trying to accomplish.  In fact, any time you can subclass rather than duplicate code, you're always better off.  Any control you put on the base form will also be on the subclassed form.  To go from the CRUD form to the List form, you can just add a method after InitializeComponent that changes the visibility of some of the toolstrip buttons to False.