Chapter 7

Building Windows Applications

What You Will Learn in this Chapter

  • How to add more features using buttons, text boxes, and radio buttons
  • How to create a simple toolbar and toolbar buttons to respond to events
  • How to create additional forms and windows in your applications

Wrox.com Code Downloads for this Chapter

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118311813 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the 311813 C07.zip download and individually named according to the names given throughout the chapter.

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 the managed languages—as Windows Forms in Windows Forms applications and as Windows in Windows Presentation Foundation (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 ...

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