Visual Basic® 2008 Programmer's Reference

Appendix G. Windows Forms Controls and Components

This appendix describes the standard controls and components provided by Visual Basic .NET. Some of these are quite complicated, providing dozens or even hundreds of properties, methods, and events, so it would be impractical to describe them all completely here. However, it's still worthwhile having a concise guide to the most important properties, methods, and events provided by the Windows Forms controls.

The sections in this appendix describe the components' general purposes and give examples of what I believe to be their simplest, most common, and most helpful usages. The idea is to help you decide which components to use for which purposes, and to give you some idea about the components' most commonly used properties, methods, and events. To learn more about a particular component, see the online help.

You can find information about most of these controls under the "System.Windows.Forms Namespace" topic in the MSDN help at msdn2.microsoft.com/library/system.windows.forms.aspx. Use the navigation tree in the left pane to find the controls you want to study.

You can also learn more by studying this appendix's example programs, which are available for download on the book's web site.

Note that all of these components inherit from the Component class, and the controls inherit from the Control class. Except where overridden, the components and controls inherit the properties, methods, and events defined by the Component and Control ...