I'm upgrading/rewriting an apllication written in VB6 to VB2008.
The main form had an outlook-like navigation with a vertical buttonbar in
the left side of the form and a bunch of frames with controls on them in the
main area. All these frames were placed exactly on top of each other, and
pushing a button on the buttonbar made a specific frame come to the fore
(using z-order). it worked nicely for the user - no flickering with forms
being loaded etc.
BUT, in VB6 it was a pain to edit the form (adding new controls etc) since
all the frames belonged to the same form and thus all the frames' controls
were likewise part of the same form making it hard to locate what needed to
be changed, and Z-order wasn't working too good at design time.

In VB2008: On a new form, placed a splitcontainer vertically: OK.
Two new panels placed on top of right panel (same size and different
backcolors) and a few controls (labels) added to each.
Problem: It's not possible to swap those two panels at design time. The
Bring to front/back does not work! Selecting the back panel and chosing Bring
to front does nothing. Selecting the top panel and chosing Send to Back makes
the label from the back panel visible - but NOT the rest of the panel.

If you should build an Outlook look-alike form what road would you take?
(The post below suggest making a form equivalent to a panel and load that
form/embed it, but I'm hesitant about loading and unloading forms due to
heavy datagrids on the forms. Using panels there is only a delay starting up)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/managed/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.do
tnet.framework.windowsforms&tid=e11c8b8e-9216-481f-957b-73613f0c85e9&cat=en-us-m
sdnman-dotnet-frmwrk&lang=en&cr=US&sloc=en-us&m=1&p=1

Any ideas or best practices?

Thanks
/Ruben