Chapter 6: Creating the Windows User Interface

Overview

Up to this point you have built a set of self-aware business objects and the forms needed to display the values returned by those business objects. You will now move on to developing the mechanisms that you will use to build the user interface. You can do many things to give the user a good experience with your application. In this chapter you will concentrate on building not only a functional user interface but one that looks good. This includes incorporating icons, displaying the application's status on a status bar, and providing basic Windows functionality that users often take for granted. More than anything your goal should be to create an application that users enjoy using.

Note

To many people—developers included—a good application is one that performs the job it is designed to do. A successful application, on the other hand, is one that is well liked and used by many people. Successful and good are two different terms that make a huge difference in a corporation. I have seen applications that developers would consider to be good fail (in the sense that nobody used it, and they went back to the old way of doing things); therefore, they were not successful. The best application is one that is good and successful. To make a successful application, it has to be an application that not only meets the users' needs but is also something that they like and want to use.

One piece of basic functionality you will implement is the ability to cut, copy, or paste from a menu or toolbar or by using the control keys. Part of this is easy to accomplish (creating the Control key combination functionality) because it is built in to almost all of the text editing controls. Part of this is more difficult to accomplish (accessing the functionality from a toolbar or menu) because although there is a Cut, Copy, or Paste method that you can invoke on a control that inherits from the Textbox base class, not all controls have this functionality. You will create this functionality for virtually any control you want.

You will also incorporate a menu that is dynamically loaded from the database, a toolbar, and a status bar. The status bar will be able to display messages from forms in your application and icons when there is an error. You will also be able to display the status of specific keys (such as the Num Lock and Caps Lock keys) on the status bar using the owner-drawn property of a panel.

In short, this chapter shows you some methods for building a great user interface.