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

Creating and Displaying

New Forms

Most of this book so far has dealt with building forms. Previous lessons explained how to add,

arrange, and handle the events of controls on a form. They’ve explained how to work with

specific kinds of controls such as

MenuStrips, ContextMenuStrips, and ToolStrips. Using

these techniques, you can build some pretty nice forms that use simple code to manipulate

properties. So far, however, you’ve only learned how a program can use a single form.

In this lesson you learn how to display multiple forms in a single program. You see how to

add new forms to the project and how to display one or more instances of those forms. Once

you’ve mastered these techniques, you can make programs that display any number of forms

for all kinds of different purposes.

ADDING NEW FORMS

To add a new form to a project, open the IDE’s Project menu and select Add Windows Form to

see the dialog shown in Figure 9-1.

Leave the Windows Form template selected, enter a good name for the new type of form,

and click Add. After you click Add, Visual Studio adds the new form type to the project.

Figure 9-2 shows the new form in Solution Explorer.

Now you can add

Labels, TextBoxes, Buttons, MenuStrips, and any other controls you like

to the new form.

Remember, to open a form in the Form Designer, double-click it in Solution

Explorer.

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LESSON 9