We have a customer solution written in another language that I am working on a conversion plan for.

The customer is accustomed to a muli-state form as commonly seen in data entry applications. For example a form may contain several groupings of data as described below.

Customer Review Screen:
Name\Address
Contact Information (email, phone, fax, mobile, etc...)

When the customer review screen is initially loaded it displays the data in "read-only" mode. Then based off of the keystrokes or buttons used the customer can choose to go into edit mode for either the name\address or contact information sections.

If the data was only to be via text boxes this would be an easy task. However, there are many other controls in use in this screen that do not have a read only attribute.

Setting the parts to disabled is not an option because it severely affects the readability of the controls on the form.

What would be your suggestions for managing this in vb.net 2010.

I had considered putting an extra text box on the form outside the bounds of the displayable area that I would force focus to if the form is not in an edit mode, then use control arrays to manage which parts are editable in certain situations. However, on paper I was having issues with a way to properly manage the loss of focus to a part, or the loss of focus to another form.

Not looking to have it coded for me or anything like that, just wanting to get other people's opinions and theories of the best way to manage these types of screens.

tia.