Chapter 2. Controls on Forms

Terms you'll need to understand:

• Controls

• Container

• TabIndex

• TabControl

• ToolTip

• Dialog boxes

• Menus

• StatusBar

• ToolBar

Techniques you'll need to master:

• Utilizing the z-order to properly sort overlapping controls

• Configuring the TabIndex and TabStop values in order to determine the order in which controls will gain focus

• Knowing how to add controls to container objects using the Forms Designer and through programmatic code

The purpose of a user interface is to allow the user to input, view, and act upon data presented by an application. Visual Basic .NET includes a wide variety of standard controls that may be added to a form to allow this functionality. Users may also create their own custom controls and include these in their applications as well.

In this chapter, we discuss the attributes common to most standard user controls, as well as more specific attributes and properties of the control types you should be familiar with before sitting down at the exam. Finally, we discuss the methods of adding controls to forms and contrast single-document and multidocument applications.