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

Using RichTextBoxes

The TextBox control lets the user enter text and that’s about it. It can display its text in different

colors and fonts, but it cannot give different pieces of text different properties. The

TextBox is

intended to let the user enter a simple string, like a name or street address, and very little more.

The

RichTextBox is a much more powerful control. It can display different pieces of text with

different colors, fonts, and styles. It can adjust paragraph indentation and make bulleted lists.

It can even include pictures. It’s not as powerful as a full-featured word processor, such as

Microsoft Word or OpenOffice’s Writer, but it can produce a much more sophisticated result

than the

TextBox.

In this lesson you learn more about the

RichTextBox control and how to use it. You have

a chance to experiment with the control, and you use it to add enough functionality to the

SimpleEdit program to finally make the program useful.

USING RICHTEXTBOX PROPERTIES

To change the appearance of the text inside a RichTextBox, you first select the text that you

want to change, and then you set one of the control’s properties to modify the text.

To select the text, you use the control’s

SelectionStart and SelectionLength properties

to indicate where the text begins and how many letters it includes. Note that the letters are

numbered starting with 0. (In fact, almost all numbering starts w ...