Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 3. Windows Applications

.NET 1.0 introduced a whole new toolkit for writing Windows applications. This toolkit—called Windows Forms—quickly won the hearts of developers with its rich features for creating self-sizing windows, customized controls, and dynamic graphics. But for all its strengths, the Windows Forms toolkit left out a few features that many VB 6 developers had come to expect, including a masked edit control and a way to display HTML web pages. The Windows Forms toolkit also lacked some of the frills found in modern Windows applications, like Office XP-style toolbars and menus with thumbnail images. As you'll see in this chapter, .NET 2.0 includes all of these elements and more.

Use Office-Style Toolbars

With .NET 1.0 and 1.1, VB developers have had to content themselves with either the woefully out-of-date ToolBar control, or draw their own custom toolbars by hand. In .NET 2.0, the situation improves with a rich new ToolStrip control that sports a modern, flat look, correctly handles Windows XP themes, and supports a wide range of graphical widgets, such as buttons, labels, drop-down lists, drop-down menus, text boxes, and more.

How do I do that?

To use the System.Windows.Forms.ToolStrip control, just drag the ToolStrip from the Menus & Toolbars section of the Visual Studio toolbox onto a form. To control which side of the form the ToolStrip lines up with, set the Docking property. For example, Figure 3-1 shows a form, Form1, with two ToolStrip controls, one ...