Beginning Microsoft® Visual Basic® 2008

Chapter 7. Building Windows Applications

When Microsoft first released Visual Basic 1.0, developers fell in love with it, because it made building the user interface components of an application very simple. Instead of having to write thousands of lines of code to display windows — the very staple of a Windows application — developers could simply draw the window on the screen.

In Visual Basic (any version), a window is known as a form. With the .NET Framework, this form design capability has been brought to all of the managed languages as Windows Forms in Windows Forms Applications and as Windows in WPF Applications. You've been using Windows Forms over the course of the previous chapters and in the last chapter you learned about Windows in WPF Applications. However, you haven't really given that much thought to them — focusing instead on the code that you've written inside them.

In this chapter, you'll look in detail at Windows Forms and Windows and learn how you can use Visual Basic 2008 to put together fully featured Windows applications using Windows Forms Application projects and WPF Application projects. In particular, you will look at:

• Adding more features using buttons, text boxes, and radio buttons

• Creating a simple toolbar and toolbar buttons to respond to events

• Creating additional forms and windows in your applications

Note

Note that in this chapter Windows Forms refers to Windows Forms Application projects, while Windows refers to WPF Application projects.

Responding to Events ...