Summary

Controls form the main connection between the user and the application. They allow the application to give information to the user, and they allow the user to control the application. Controls are everywhere in practically every Windows application. Only a tiny percentage of applications that run completely in the background can do without controls.

This chapter briefly describes purposes of the standard Visual Basic controls and provides a few tips for selecting the controls appropriate for different purposes. Appendix G describes the controls in much greater detail.

Even knowing all about the controls doesn’t guarantee that you can produce an adequate user interface. There’s a whole science to designing user interfaces that are intuitive and easy to use. A good design enables the user to get a job done naturally and with a minimum of wasted work. A bad interface can encumber the user and turn even a simple job into an exercise in beating the application into submission.

For more information on building usable applications, read some books on user-interface design. They explain standard interface issues and solutions. You can also learn a lot by studying other successful applications. Look at the layout of their forms and dialog boxes. You shouldn’t steal their designs outright, but you can try to understand why they arrange their controls in the way they do. Look at applications that you like and find particularly easy to use. Compare them with applications that you find awkward and confusing.

This chapter provides an introduction to Windows Forms controls. These are graphical objects that can sit on a Windows form to interact with the user. In fact, forms themselves are also controls. The Form class inherits from the ContainerControl class, which inherits from the ScrollableControl class, which inherits from the Control base class. While in a sense forms are just another kind of control, they are such an important type of control that they deserve special attention. Chapter 10 provides an introduction to forms and explains some of the special form-related issues that don’t apply to other kinds of controls.