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Download free Building Visual Basic .NET Windows Applications.pdf book Windows Application is really inappropriate as a project title, considering that it has the ability to be compiled to IL and ported to another operating system where it can be natively compiled. We’ll use this term only because it’s the name of the project type in .NET. Rather than attempting to demonstrate every feature related to developing Windows applications in Visual Basic .NET, we will use key features and tools that will help you see the object-oriented nature of .NET as you work with the standard design components in the Visual Studio .NET IDE. The main focus of this chapter is to introduce you to some key concepts related to .NET development using forms and controls, while looking at their underlying implementation in .NET. In Chapter 5, “Advanced .NET Windows Applications,” we will build applications with a wider range of features. Working with .NET Forms and Controls The basic unit of development in a .NET Windows application is (still) a form. Each form represents a single window in a running application. We add controls from the Toolbox to enhance a form’s user interface. The .NET version of a form has many new features. In .NET, all languages create a form based on the System.Windows.Forms.Form class in the common language runtime libraries. When I say “based on,” I am actually referring to an OOP concept known as implementation inheritance, which allows one type to establish a relationship to another type for the purpose of inheriting functionality. Look at it this way: Visual Basic has always had forms, but we have never had to design into them the ability to be resized or minimized or to display a blue title bar, and so on. All that functionality was inherited from a generic Form object when we added the form to our project. Even in Visual Basic 6 we could declare a variable of type Form, and a new object would be created in memory that had its own Name, hwnd, caption, and so on. Even the first piece of code you see in Visual Basic .NET requires that you have some understanding of Inheritance, as you can see in the Visual Basic .NET code that follows.

Building Visual Basic .NET Windows Applications