Programming Visual Basic 2005

Chapter 1. Design and First Forms

In this chapter you will begin to create a Windows application. You will find that we get down to business immediately with as little fuss as possible. The introductory comments are intended to set the stage for everything else we're doing. I'll keep them short.

The requirements for a meaningful Windows application will be spelled out in this chapter, and the rest of the book will focus on implementing that application. We will finesse the design, exploring design decisions as we go, and our general approach will be that of successive approximation; that is: get it working and keep it working, as you add new functionality.

At times, this approach will cause us to write and rewrite the same section. One could argue that had we designed in advance we would avoid those cul-de-sacs, but it is exploring these dead ends, and the improvements we can make as we progressively improve our product, that will bring out essential aspects of Visual Basic 2005 programming.

The Requirements

Over the course of part one of this book, we will create an application based on a real-world application I recently built for one of my clients. We will use the application to explore retrieving and updating data from the Northwind Database that comes with SqlServer and SqlExpress.

Tip

At the time of this writing, Microsoft is urging that .NET applications use SqlExpress in preference to Access, and so we shall in this book, though converting the code to support an Access database ...