Visual Basic .NET Forms

The Default Form

In the Visual Basic NET design time environment, the first thing to concentrate on is that funny grey square with all the dots on it. That's called a form. It's actually the pretty bit of your programme, 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. Here's what it looks like:

In case you're wondering what those little dots are for, they are there purely for your benefit (you won't see any dots in the Express edition). They allow you to align things like textboxes and labels with a degree of precision. They won't appear when you run the form. If you don't believe me, try this:

Congratulations! You have now created your very first programme. It should look like this:

As you can see, all of the dots are gone!

Click the Red X on the form to stop it from running. You will then be returned to the form with the dots on it.

If you compare the first form with the one above, you'll see they look quite different. That's because the one above is actually a real programme, 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 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 (and code, of course ); Debug is where you can test your programme 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 two step process to VB programming: designing 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!

Click below for the next lesson (unless you fancy buying our VB .NET book!).

<-- Back One Page Move on to the Next Part -->

<--Back to the .NET Contents Page

View all our Home Study Computer Courses