Make ControlLibrary user control Hide()

I've spent three days trying to get a user control to do some obvious things -- show, hide, and focus among other things. Done in vBASIC in Visual Studio 2010 Pro. The calling program is a Windows Forms Application, while the user control is a WPF Custom Control Library with a single object, a textbox. The reason it's a user control is that this textbox is connected to an async serial device; the reason it's in a Custom Control Library is that I'd like to be able to drop this functioning serial-port-connected textbox into future projects.

No matter what syntax I attempt, the user control (neither the control nor the text box inside it) will Hide(). I've tried every variation I can think of with control.Visible = false, exposing public subs to do the work, etc. :mad: When the form appears and characters are typed in the field, the KeyPress routine is functioning -- it will only accept numeric digits.

Here's the vastly reduced code to illustrate the problem:

Calling Windows Forms Application Code:

Imports DTRFormsControlLibrary2

Public Class Form1

Dim sbControl As ucDTRScanBox

Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
sbControl = New ucDTRScanBox()
sbControl.Hide()
End Sub

End Class

Responding WPF Custom Control Library code:

Public Class ucDTRScanBox

Public Sub New()
InitializeComponent()
End Sub

Private Sub sbRFIDTag_KeyPress(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Forms.KeyPressEventArgs) Handles sbRFIDTag.KeyPress
If Not IsNumeric(e.KeyChar) Then e.Handled = True
End Sub
End Class

In spite of the call to sbControl.Hide(), the form opens with a very visible and enabled user control text box. The ability to control visibility, focus, and enable/disable seems fundamental to any control. It shouldn't be this hard. What am I missing? :confused:

TIA to anyone who's dealt with this and is willing to set me straight...

Should have mentioned that both projects (calling Windows Form and ControlLibrary) are present in the solution tree.

Also should have mentioned that the textbox object inside the user control is named sbRFIDTag.

Never mind! I was trying to refer to the user control by its name in the Control Library rather than its name on the calling program's form. I did have to drop the overloaded constructor to the control, but was able to incorporate a Public Sub within the control with byRef parameters to compensate for it.

Imports System.IO.Ports
Imports DTRFormsControlLibrary2

Public Class Form1

Dim comPort As SerialPort

Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
ucScanBox1.Hide()
ucScanBox1.OpenCOM(comPort, "COM1")
bnScan.Focus()
End Sub

Private Sub bnScan_Click(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles bnScan.Click
ucScanBox1.Show()
ucScanBox1.Focus()
ucScanBox1.sb_hide()
End Sub
End Class

All of the calls to ucScanBox1 work now. :bigyello: