Visual Basic .NET Forms Knowledge Base Ashutosh Mukherjee ashutosh@desdevpro.com http://www.desdevpro.com 11 Aug 2009 Visual Basic VB.NET Tutorial Series Welcome to Visual Basic 2008, the most mature version yet of the most popular programming language for building Windows and web applications. I will help you build your concepts bit-by-bit in this tutorial series. Think of this as an e-Classroom. If you have any comments/questions, you can use the comments box on the right, or you can contact me through e-mail. The Default Form In the Visual Basic .NET design time environment, the first thing to concentrate on is a strange, big square in the top left. That's called a form. It's actually the pretty bit of your program, the part that others will see when they launch your masterpiece. Granted, it doesn't look too attractive at the moment, but you'll soon discover ways to lick it into shape. To run the form, try this: From the menu bar, click Debug From the drop down menu, click Start Alternatively, press the F5 key on your keyboard Your programme is launched Congratulations! You have now created your very first programme. It should look like this: 002_img1.jpg A VB .NET Form Running as a Program or rather we can say as an application Click the Red X button (close button in the controlbox) on the form to stop it from running. You will then be returned to the software environment. If you compare the first form with the one above, you'll see that they look very similar. But the one above is actually a real program, something you could package and sell to unsuspecting village idiots. So what's going on? Why the two different views? Well, Visual Basic has two distinct environments, a Design environment, a Code environment and a Debug environment. Design Time is where you get to play about with the form, spruce it up, add textboxes, and buttons, and labels . Code editor is the one where you do your coding. Debug is where you can test your program and see how well it performs or doesn't perform, as is usually the case. But don't worry about the terminology, for the time being. Just be aware that there's a three step process to VB programming: designing, coding and debugging. So, let's get on and do some designing! Before we can start designing a form, though, we need some tools. And where are tools kept? In a toolbox! To be continued...