Beginning Microsoft® Visual C#® 2008

Chapter 15. Basic Windows Programming

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 control adds a handler for that control. The controls provided by Microsoft, along with additional custom controls that could be bought at reasonable prices, have supplied programmers with an unprecedented pool of reusable, thoroughly tested code that is no more than a mouse click away. Such application development is now available to C# developers through Visual Studio.

In this chapter, you work with Windows Forms, and use some of the many controls that ship with Visual Studio. These controls cover a wide range of functionality, and through the design capabilities of Visual Studio, developing user interfaces and handling user interaction is very straightforward—and ...