Summary

Menus, toolbars, and status bars add tremendous value to an application by greatly enhancing its usability. In this hour, you learned how to use the MenuStrip and ContextMenuStrip controls to build comprehensive menus for your applications. You learned how to add, move, and delete menu items and how to define accelerator and shortcut keys to facilitate better navigation via the keyboard. You also saw how toolbars provide shortcuts for accessing common menu items. You learned how to use the ToolStrip control to create functional toolbars complete with bitmaps and logical groupings. Finally, you discovered how to use a status strip to dress up the application. Implementing these items is an important part of the interface design process for an application, and you now have the skills necessary to start putting them into your own programs.