Hey everyone, I am in over my head and was looking for a little bit of guidance. I just started learning .NET last week and my boss is needing me to develop an application for 100 users. The only real programming I have done was in VB6 and that was mainly for little utility programs to import vendor files into a database, create text files to convert and import data from one system to another, that kind of stuff. So here I am trying to develop my first multi-user program, in a language that I don't know, and in an object oriented environment which I know very little about. Yay.

I have run into a couple of challenges that I am not sure how to approach and figured maybe some of you could point me in the right direction. Both of these issues are related to opening a form, prompting another form to open and gathering information, and then sending that information back to the first form.

The first scenario: When I run the application, I have a menu of different screens. I select the "Benefits Management" screen (which has information about an employee's benefits). That screen opens and all of the data fields are blank. I then want to hit a hot-key that opens another form with a listing of employees. When I select the employee and hit a command button, I want that employee list form to disappear and the first form to automatically display all the benefits information for the selected employee.

The second scenario: I have a reports screen with a dropdown list of numerous reports and then a crystal reports viewer below. I select a report and then another small form opens up with all of the parameters required by that particular report. I enter the parameter data and hit a command button and again, that small form passes the entered data back to the original reports form and the report is automatically displayed, based on the parameters entered by the user.

The part I am having trouble with on both of these scenarios is getting the data from the second forms that "pop up" back to the original forms, and then those forms responding by displaying the necessary information. I have read information on passing data between forms but nothing seems to really work for me. Do I need to set up events on the second pop up forms and then create event handlers on the first forms that will respond once the employee has been selected (scenario 1) or the report parameters have been entered (scenario 2)?

I'm not looking for code specifically, just some direction on the logical approach for doing this.

Also, I don't really have a main application class or anything like that at this point. I just have my MDI form and then about 10 other forms.

Uhhh....help?