Faster Smarter Beginning Programming

Chapter 10. Interacting with Windows Form Controls

At first glance, the user interface for most Microsoft Windows desktop programs appears to be a Windows form. In fact, however, a program that displayed only a blank Windows form wouldn’t have much of a user interface at all. The form only becomes useful when you embellish it with text boxes, list boxes, check boxes, option boxes, buttons, labels, and all the other gizmos now so familiar to millions of people. Each such gizmo is a Windows form control.

The term control might seem a bit abstract but if steam valves, oven dials, and accelerator pedals can be controls, so can buttons and list boxes. The term control also has historical significance because at one time all these objects were ActiveX ...