Application Development Using Visual Basic® and .NET

Windows Applications Using the .NET SDK

To gain insight into how Windows Forms works, it will be helpful to build a simple application using only the .NET Framework SDK. See the program ByHand and its progressive steps. None of these steps use Visual Studio. The file build.bat is a simple batch file that you should run at the command prompt to build the executable.

Step 1: A Simple Form

The following code illustrates a bare-bones Windows application. It is Step 1 of the example ByHand.

Imports System.Windows.Forms

Class MainWindow
   Inherits System.Windows.Forms.Form

   Public Shared Sub Main()
      Application.Run(new MainWindow())
   End Sub

End Class

Our MainWindow class inherits from System.Windows.Forms.Form. The key to Windows Forms programming is ...