Awesome, Thanks a lot - the whole matrix issue was a bit daunting but it makes more sense now. I will dig in right now and try it out. cheers Ian

One part of the article you linked talks about passing information between forms using properties, like the example you provided, and towards the end the article provides examples of using delegates and events to pass info between forms. My suggestion is that you use delegates and events, instead of properties, and raise the event in the child form as the child is closing (in the FormClosing event) so that the information gets returned to the parent form at that time, instead of being lost on the close. Or, as an alternative, you could raise the event whenever the text is actually changed, and make the changes to the database each time the text is changed. If you did try the delegates/events example, and had problems with that, please describe what problem/error you were receiving.

Thanks Mark, The book looks good and I will amazon it soon !! Cheers Ian

Not really - MDI is much the same as any other winforms app. The only suggetions I would give are: 1. Get very familiar with events and delegates as inevitably you'll find the need to get your child forms communicating with their parent and siblings. 2. All your child forms are actually hosted in a container which is an instance of the MdiClient class. You may find sometimes it's useful to have access to that control. Creating this readonly property and member variable in your MdiParent will make this much easier. private MdiClient m\_MdiClient; public MdiClient MdiClient { get { if (m\_MdiClient != null) return m\_MdiClient; foreach (Control control in Controls) { if (control is MdiClient) { m\_MdiClient = (MdiClient)control; return m\_MdiClient; } } throw new Exception("MdiClient control could not be found"); } } You then have access to all the containers properties, methods and events! Dave BTW, in software, hope and pray is not a viable strategy. (Luc Pattyn) Expect everything to be hard and then enjoy the things that come easy. (code-frog)