.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell

Built-in Controls

Windows provides several kinds of widely used controls, such as buttons and text boxes, which act as the fundamental building blocks in most user interfaces. All these standard control types have .NET equivalents. This section shows which controls are available and what their Win32 equivalents are. It also describes some of the issues common to all the standard controls. More detailed technical descriptions of each control can be found in the reference section.

Available Controls

Table 2-1 shows the list of available controls and the nearest equivalent window class in Win32. (Some Win32 classes, such as Button, have several different modes, each of which is represented by a different class in Windows Forms. In this case, a Win32 window style is also specified to indicate which particular flavor of this class the relevant .NET type represents.)

Table 2-1. .NET controls and their equivalent Win32 control classes

Control class	Equivalent Win32 window class (and style)	Purpose
Buttons
Button	Button (BS_PUSHBUTTON)	Normal button for actions (e.g., OK or Cancel)
CheckBox	Button (BS_CHECKBOX)	Yes/no selection button
RadioButton	Button (BS_RADIOBUTTON)	Single selection from a range of choices
Labels and pictures
GroupBox	Button (BS_GROUPBOX)	Visual grouping for sets of related controls
Label	Static (SS_LEFT, SS_CENTER, SS_RIGHT)	Text label, usually providing a name or description for some other control (e.g., a text box)
PictureBox	Static ...