Learning C# 3.0

Creating a Simple Windows Form

The first difference you’ll notice between the applications in this chapter and the ones you’ve written up to this point is that Windows applications have a visual component, called a form. The interface you see is the form, and the buttons, text boxes, and other widgets that make up the form are called controls. You build simply by dragging and dropping controls onto a work area. Some code goes into creating the appearance and default behavior of the controls, but all of that is created for you by Visual Studio, and you never have to see it.

And that’s the second thing you’ll notice: up until now, just about every bit of code that you worked with was written exclusively by you. You saw back in Chapter 2, though, that Visual Studio is capable of inserting prefabricated code snippets to save you time. This is a larger extension of the same idea. In fact, you won’t see Main( ) anymore, because Windows takes care of that part. Your functional code will be contained in event handlers, and the objects you create will be called from those event handlers.

In effect, moving from the command line to Windows programming entails an entirely different metaphor of programming—a visual metaphor, hence the name of Visual Studio.

Using the Visual Studio Designer

Although you can build a Windows application using any text editor, there’s really no point. As you’ve already seen, Visual Studio increases your productivity, and integrates an editor, compiler, test environment, ...