Chapter 2


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Chapter 5

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Chapter 7

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Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Table of Contents


The Grand Tour

The toolbar, across the top of the screen, contains buttons for commonly used Visual Basic operations.

The toolbox, on the left side of the screen, contains objects or controls that are the tools of Visual Basic. Controls are put on forms where they display and accept data and other operations.

The Project window lists the files, forms, and modules that make up a programming project.

The Properties window displays the properties of objects. You can edit these properties in the window.

The Visual Basic Help system is an excellent online resource for the VB programmer.

The form is the "face" of you program. A project may contain many forms.

The textbox control is used to enter text. The text in the box can be edited with all the customary Windows editing commands.

The label control is used to display text. Values are converted to text to display in a label.

The command control responds to a mouse click by executing the code containted in the control.

The Name property of controls allows the control to be referenced in code. The name is used to manipulate the control in Basic Statements.

The Text property of a textbox can be read by a program, allowing the user to enter text. The program can also write to the Text property, turning the textbox into a display control.

The Caption property of a label control displays strings written into the property by program statements.

The user causes events to which the application is programmed to respond. Each VB control responds to one or more events. Each event is associated with a section of code to handle the event. If the code is not present, the event goes unnoticed by the program.

The Click event responds when the mouse button is clicked on the control. The KeyPress event responds when a text key is pressed.

Saving a project means saving the forms, files, and modules that make up a project. Simple objects have only a single form and the project file to save.

Visual Basic can print the form of a project, just the code, or a text description of the form, called form text.

You can create an executable file from the File menu. The .exe file created requires the appropriate copy of VBRUNxxx.DLL to run.

To stop running a program, click on the Stop button in the toolbar, select End from the Visual Basic Run menu, or click on a properly coded command button in the program.