Thanks for your answers. Both were very helpful and both brought up new questions .

First off, the whole thing works now. The SetSize-Method did the job and not it draws my playfield in all its glory :roll:

Now the new questions. First, i am going to get a bit more specific about what I want to do. The plan is to program a nice little turn based strategy game. The extra surface i mentioned is used to draw the playfield including terrain, units, buildings and so on. The playfield can be scrolled and my routine draws only the stuff that can actualy be seen by the player. Later, I want to embed the playfield into an interface. To make the playfield independent from the interface i thought it would be a good idea to place it on a seperate surface which i could place later wherever i would like to.
So would it be better not to use a seperate surface for this but draw everything on directly on the DXDraw.Surface instead? Does the usage of multiple surfaces slow down the drawing process considerably? And for the second question, is there anything wrong with the shorter Draw-Method i used or is it just less flexible?

About your explanation crisp, it was very clear and i had no problems understanding it
By the way, thanks a lot traveler for writing these great tutorials. They have really been a great help.