Summary

This chapter describes controls, components, and objects in general terms. It tells how to create controls and how to use their properties, methods, and events. It spends some extra time on data-validation events, as well as adding and removing event handlers.

Appendix A describes the most useful properties, methods, and events provided by the Control class. All controls that inherit from this class also inherit these properties, methods, and events, unless they take action to override the Control class’s behavior.

Appendix G describes the standard Windows controls in detail. This appendix can help you understand the controls and decide which is best for a particular situation.

This chapter gives some useful background for working with controls in general, but there’s more to building a Visual Basic application than just controls. You also need to understand the code behind the controls that lets the program take values from controls, manipulate those values, and display a result in the controls. The next several chapters cover these topics in detail. Chapter 3 starts the process by explaining the files that make up a Visual Basic project and the structure contained within code files.