Stephens' C# Programming with Visual Studio® 2010 24-Hour Trainer

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LESSON 2 Creating Controls

WHAT’S IN A NAME, PART 3

Most C# developers add a control’s type as a suffix to its name as in

firstNameTextBox or resultLabel, but it’s becoming more common for devel-

opers to use a more generic word such as

Value or Field. The idea is that if you

decide to change the type of control that handles the value, you won’t need to

change the code that refers to the control.

For example, suppose your program uses a

TrackBar to let the user specify the

number of UFO detectors to purchase. If you name this control

numUfoDetectors-

Value

, they you won’t need to change the code if you later decide to let the user

select the value from a

NumericUpDown control instead of a TrackBar.

Some developers even omit the suffix completely as in

numUfoDetectors, although

that can be confusing if you need more than one control to represent a similar con-

cept or you want a variable inside the code that holds the numeric value represented

by the control.

For now, I recommend that you stick with the control’s full type name as a suffix.

Popular Properties

You’ll learn about key control properties as you go along and you can see a summary of key properties

for specific controls in Appendix B, but for now Table 2-1 summarizes some of the most useful proper-

ties. Note that not all controls have every property. For example, a

Button cannot display a border so

it has no

BorderStyle prop ...