Windows Forms Standards

At work, we develop for both the web and for Windows. One of the things that we've had issues with over the years as developers come and go from our team, is keeping the Windows forms (written C#) consistent as far as usability goes. These are simple things to do, but sometimes hard to remember. I'm posting them here partly for me to remember and partly for others to maybe learn from. This list isn't meant to be exhaustive; just a few things seem to consistently pop up.

• Escape key should trigger the Cancel or Close button on the form. A lot people (me included) use the keyboard as much as possible, and this allows quickly closing the form you were using. To do this, just set the CancelButton property on the form to the ID of the appropriate button.
• If your form has an obvious default button, set that as well. This is done by setting the AcceptButton property. This allows the Enter key to trigger that button even when it doesn't have focus.
  
• Tab order should be set. Our internal standard is left to right, top to bottom on the form, unless otherwise specified by requirements. It doesn't matter what standard you use, as long as you have one and stick to it on every form you write. Visual Studio has a great visual way of doing this. With the form selected, click on View, then "Tab Order". This will put little numbers beside each form element. Just click on each element in the order you want them to be tabbed through. When you're done, the Escape key will exit out of this mode.
• Groupboxes should be used to separate functional areas on a form. For example, on a search form, the criteria would be in one groupbox, and the results grid would be in another. We use the Infragistics NetAdvantage suite, so we always use their UltraGroupBox control, but the standard Windows one works well too.
• Going back to keyboard usage: Menu items should have an accelerator key, where possible. To do this, just put an ampersand ("&") before the letter in the menu caption that you want to be the accelerator. This allows those of use who prefer using the keyboard to more quickly navigate around the application.
• Buttons on a form should also have accelerator keys when possible. This is done the same way it is for menus: just put “&” before the letter you want to be the accelerator. The “Cancel” button does not need this done, since it will always use Escape as its accelerator.
• For internationalization, we also always put field labels above the textbox or other control they refer to. This normally allows for more space to put in foreign languages, since they can end up being much longer than the original English equivalent.