What Do the Component and Control Classes Do for Us?
Adding Controls Dynamically
Creating Custom UserControls
Creating Custom Controls
Summary
Many of you have been designing user interfaces for years. If you started using Visual Basic for DOS or the BASIC programming language before Visual Basic, you have 10 or more years of experience in developing the presentation layer of applications.
Even if you are completely new to visual programming, it is intuitive. Click a control from the toolbox and drop it on a form or Web form, and then tie the necessary code to that control. Even nonprogrammers understand the metaphor for visual programming; this is what makes visual programming tools so powerful.
Chapter 16 demonstrates what might not be intuitive about assembling and designing a graphical user interface (GUI) using Visual Basic .NET. I will also demonstrate how to do things that earlier tools were incapable of doing. In this chapter we will look at the new designer tools for implementing menus and how to add menus on the fly. We will take a quick look at new features for managing control layout, and we will spend considerable time on component building. Components are essential to GUIs, so we will spend a predominant amount of time in this chapter building components. If you can easily build components, you will surely be able to use them. The rest is aesthetics.
