| IMO it's important for beginners to understand at the very least what the native handlers are doing, even if they aren't using them in any way. Otherwise they are just these mysterious "things" being passed into your event methods that VS is generating for you.
Writing your own subs/methods is also helpful in understanding how everything is tied together. While it's nice to double click a button in your designer view and be taken to an auto-generated onclick event method, there is some value in knowing everything that went into the process (like wiring up those events).
You are talking to a pure software guy though, perhaps you are right in regards to a basic programming class intended for network admins/hardware guys /shrug |