Programming Visual Basic .NET

Chapter 4. Windows Forms I: Developing Desktop Applications

Windows Forms is a set of classes that encapsulates the creation of the graphical user interface (GUI) portion of a typical desktop application. Previously, each programming language had its own way of creating windows, text boxes, buttons, etc. This functionality has all been moved into the .NET Framework class library—into the types located in the System.Windows.Forms namespace. Closely related is the System.Drawing namespace, which contains several types used in the creation of GUI applications. The capabilities provided by the types in the System.Drawing namespace are commonly referred to as GDI+ (discussed more fully later in this chapter).

In this chapter, we’ll examine the form (or window) as the central component in a classic desktop application. We’ll look at how forms are programmatically created and how they’re hooked to events. We’ll also examine how multiple forms in a single application relate to one another and how you handle forms in an application that has one or more child forms. Finally, we’ll discuss two topics, printing and 2-D graphics, that are relevant to desktop application development.

Creating a Form

The easiest way to design a form is to use the Windows Forms Designer in Visual Studio .NET. The developer can use visual tools to lay out the form, with the designer translating the layout into Visual Basic .NET source code. If you don’t have Visual Studio .NET, you can write the Visual Basic ...