Chapter 12
Resolving Issues with Forms
In 1988, Alan Cooper demonstrated a prototype called Ruby to Bill Gates. Ruby provided a form designer that allowed you to drag and drop controls, then known as gizmos, to quickly and easily create composite forms such as dialog boxes, entry forms, and report forms. Microsoft took Cooper s Ruby product and combined it with Basic to create Microsoft Visual Basic 1. Microsoft has since shipped a version of Ruby with every version of Visual Basic, versions 1 through 6. With every version, that is, until Visual Basic .NET.
Visual Basic .NET provides a new forms package called Windows Forms. Although the Windows Forms package was designed using the same basic principle as Ruby it is a form designer that allows you to drag and drop controls and set properties it was never meant to be an extension of, nor to be compatible with, Ruby. Therefore, there are fundamental differences between the two forms packages that affect the way you create Visual Basic applications.
This chapter focuses on some of the fundamental differences between the Ruby and Windows Forms packages. Specifically, it discusses issues that the Upgrade Wizard does not handle for you. Before we get into the differences, however, let s look at what Windows Forms and Ruby have in common.