Chapter 14: Basic Windows Programming


Overview

In recent years, Visual Basic has won great acclaim for granting programmers the tools for creating highly detailed user interfaces via an intuitive form designer, along with an easy-to-learn programming language that together produced probably the best environment out there for Rapid Application Development. One of the advantages offered by Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool such as Visual Basic is that it provided access to a number of prefabricated controls that could be used to quickly build the user interface for an application.

At the heart of the development of most Visual Basic Windows applications is the form designer. You create a user interface by dragging and dropping controls from a Toolbox to your form, placing them where you want them to be when you run the program, double-clicking the control adds a handler for that control. The controls provided by Microsoft along with further custom controls that could be bought at reasonable prices have supplied programmers with an unprecedented pool of reusable, thoroughly tested code that is no more than a mouse click away. Such application development is now available to C# developers through Visual Studio.

In this chapter, you work with Windows Forms, and use some of the many controls that ship with Visual Studio. These controls cover a wide range of functionality, and through the design capabilities of Visual Studio, developing user interfaces and handling user interaction is very straightforward — and fun! Presenting all of the controls present in Visual Studio is impossible within the scope of this book, so in this chapter you look at some of the most commonly used controls, ranging from labels and text boxes to list views and tab controls.

In this chapter you learn about:

  • The Windows Forms designer

  • Controls for displaying information to the user, such as the Label and LinkLabel controls

  • Controls for triggering events, such as the Button control

  • Controls that allow you to have the user of your application enter text, such as the TextBox control

  • Controls that allow you to inform the user of the current state of the application and allow the user to change that state, such as the RadioButton and CheckButton controls

  • Controls that allow you to display lists of information, such as the ListBox and ListView controls

  • Controls that allow you to group other controls together, such as the TabControl and Groupbox




Beginning Visual C# 2005
Beginning Visual C#supAND#174;/sup 2005
ISBN: B000N7ETVG
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 278

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