Creating the Visual Look of Your Program: Introduction to Windows Forms

The user interface is the part of your program that users see when they run the program. A user interface usually consists of a main window or form, and several controls, such as buttons, fields for entering text, and so forth. These types of Visual Basic programs are known as Windows Forms applications, and the user interface is created using Windows Forms controls.

Note

You can also create applications for Windows by using the newer Windows Presentation Foundation technology. This will be covered in the next set of lessons, Creating the Visual Look of Your Program: Introduction to Windows Presentation Foundation.

The lessons in this section will show you how to create a user interface using some of the most common Windows Forms controls.

In This Section

• Communicating with Your Program's User: The User Interface
  Describes how to create a form and add controls to it.

• Interacting with the User: Using Buttons
  Describes how to add a button to a form and add code that will run when the user clicks the button.

• Displaying and Receiving Text: Using Labels and Text Boxes
  Describes how a label and text box can be used to display text and receive text input from the user.

• Making Your Program React to the User: Creating an Event Handler
  Describes how to create an event handler for a button.

• Getting User Choices: Using Check Boxes and Radio Buttons
  Describes how to use check boxes and radio buttons to present and retrieve user choices.

• Displaying Images: Using the PictureBox Control
  Describes how to display images on a form.

• Giving Users Choices: Creating Menus at Design Time
  Describes how to add standard menus and menus items to a Windows Forms application.

• Using Timers to Perform Regular Actions
  Describes how to use the Timer component to run code at set intervals.

• Multiple-Item Controls: Working with ListBox and ComboBox Controls
  Describes how to add items to and remove items from lists.

• Displaying Dates: Using MonthCalendar and DateTimePicker Controls
  Describes how to retrieve a date selected in a MonthCalendar control and a DateTimePicker control and display it on a Windows Form.

• Invisible Controls: Using Components
  Introduces components and describes how to add a component that enables you to validate data entered into a program.

• Reusing Controls: Working with Built-in Dialog Boxes
  Describes how to use built-in dialog boxes to display an Open File dialog box, apply a font to text, and apply a color to a form.

• Pushing Buttons: Adding Toolbars and Buttons
  Describes how to add a ToolStrip control to an application and how to add a button to the ToolStrip.

• Providing Your Own Explorer: Working with TreeView Controls
  Describes how to make an application resemble Windows Explorer by using a TreeView control.

Related Sections

• Closer Look: Sharing an Event Handler
  Describes how to create a shared event handler that handles events for more than one control.

• Closer Look: Using Multiple Groups of Radio Buttons
  Describes how to create multiple groups of mutually exclusive radio buttons on a single form.

• Closer Look: More About Menus
  Describes how to enable or disable menus at run time, and also how to create pop-up menus.

• Visual Basic Guided Tour
  A series of sequential lessons that introduce you to the basics of programming in Visual Basic 2008.

• What Went Wrong? Finding and Fixing Errors Through Debugging
  Describes how to use the debugging tools in Visual Basic 2008.

• Introduction to the Visual Basic Programming Language
  Describes the basics of the Visual Basic language.