Datasheet

Figure 1-10

That was simple, but your little application isn’t doing much at the moment. Let us make it a little more

interactive. To do this, you are going to add some controls — a label, a text box, and two buttons to the

form. This will let you see how the Toolbox makes adding functionality quite simple. You may be won-

dering at this point when you will actually look at some code. Soon! The great thing about Visual Basic

2005 is that you can develop a fair amount of your application without writing any code. Sure, the code is

still there, behind the scenes, but, as you will see, Visual Basic 2005 writes a lot of it for you.

The Toolbox

The Toolbox is accessed via the View ➪ Toolbox menu option, the Toolbox icon on the Standard menu

bar, or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+X. Alternatively, the Toolbox tab is displayed on the left of the IDE; hover-

ing your mouse over this tab will cause the Toolbox window to fly out, partially covering your form.

The Toolbox contains a Node type view of the various controls and components that can be placed onto

your form. Controls such as text boxes, buttons, radio buttons, and combo boxes can be selected and

then drawn onto your form. For the HelloUser application, you will be using only the controls in the

Common Controls node. In Figure 1-11, you can see a listing of common controls for Windows Forms.

Controls can be added to your forms in any order, so it does not matter if you add the label control after

the text box or the buttons before the label. In the next Try It Out, you start adding controls.

Welcome to Visual Basic 2005

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