Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET 2003 Kick Start

Coding Without Control Arrays

One of the more noticeable changes for a Visual Basic 6.0 developer who is getting started in Windows forms is the lack of control arrays. This feature of pre-.NET VB allowed you to configure a set of controls with a single name by assigning index values to each control. Once a control array was created, a single event procedure could be used to handle the events of all the controls in the array and you could also loop through the controls in an array based on index. These features made control arrays useful for a great many projects, but I mostly remember using this feature to handle groups of option buttons (radio buttons in .NET). Consider this form in VB6 (see Figure 3.4), which displays a six-item option button ...