Introduction to Visual Basic 2010 Working Area and The Controls

Control / base object is a object that is often used in making program, some of which are :

• buttons
• text box
• labels
• radio button
• check box
• combo box
• list box
• tool tip
• Numeric Up Down

each control has several properties, methods and events :

• Properties are the attributes that describe the object (size, color, etc).
• Events are event that characterize how an object responds to commands (Click, MouseHover).
• Methods define the actions taken by the object.

Examples of properties:

• BackColor
• Enabled
• ForeColor
• Location
• Name
• Size(Height, Width)
• Text
• Visible

Properties can be set manually or by program code

Default Events :
Each control has a default event that is set when the control is created, for example:

• Button : Click
• Text Box : TextChanged
• Radio Button : CheckedChanged
• Check Box : CheckedChanged
• Combo Box : SelectedIndexChanged

For more details, we can try to make each control in Visual Basic 2010 IDE. We can start by opening Visual Basic application via our windows start menu.

visual studio 2010 welcome screen  :

to create a new project, we can select the menu File-> new -> project, then you will see the following dialog:

in this tutorial we choose Windows Form Application, because we will create a desktop based application.
In the (project)name field, we can fill this with MyVBTutorial and  in the Location field, we can determine the location of our project file. The Solution name is same with our project name, then we can press the OK button, then the visual studio 2010 working area will appear :

four essential part of the visual studio 2010 working area is the toolbox bar, form, solution explorer and properties bar.

Toolbox is used to insert the selected controls to the form ,like button, checkbox, combobox, label, etc. Solution Explorer displays a list of projects and forms contained within the project, and the properties bar are used to set the attributes of the control.

The examples of the use of control : GroupBox, RadioButton, Button, TextBox, Label and ComboBox in the form can be seen in the following example:

 
We will learn how to set control properties and write code for the form above in the next post.