Programming Visual Basic 2005

Building the Controls

Add a new project to your existing solution. To do so, right-click on the solution and choose Add → New project. Leave the Location the same as the location for your previous project, but name the new project NorthWindControls. Be sure to set the template to Windows Control Library, as shown in Figure 4-3.

Figure 4-3. Create the new Windows Control Library project

Visual Studio 2005 creates a new project (NorthWindControls) and within that project adds a UserControl, which it names UserControl1. Begin by renaming its file to RolodexPanel.vb.

To use the Rolodex panel, however, you need Rolodex entries. Therefore, you need to create a couple of additional custom controls.

To start, right-click on the new project and choose Add → New User Control and name it RolodexEntry.vb. This will serve as the base class for all the specialized RolodexEntry controls. You will create a derived RolodexEntry type for customers (RolodexCustomerEntry), on which the discussion in this chapter will focus. If you like, you can also create RolodexEntry types for Suppliers, Employees, and Orders.

RolodexEntry will have a Boolean member: chosen.

Public MustInherit Class RolodexEntry
    Protected chosen As Boolean

In addition, you will define an event for this user control. As you remember, all controls can publish events. The controls you've used so far have had such events as Click. You can create ...