Beginning Visual C# 2010

Chapter 15. Basic Windows Programming

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER

• 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 enable users of your application to enter text, such as the TextBox control

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

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

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

About 10 years ago, Visual Basic won great acclaim for providing programmers with 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 (RAD). One of the advantages offered by RAD tools such as Visual Basic is that they provide access to a number of prefabricated controls that can 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 Forms Designer. You create a user interface by dragging and dropping controls from a Toolbox to your form, placing them where you want them to appear when you run the program; double-clicking the ...