Chapter 6. Basic Windows Controls

In previous chapters, we explored the environment of Visual Basic and the principles of event-driven programming, which is the core of VB's programming model. In the process, we briefly explored a few basic controls through the examples. The .NET Framework provides many more controls, and all of them have a multitude of trivial properties (such as Font, BackgroundColor, and so on), which you can set either in the Properties window or from within your code.

This chapter explores in depth the basic Windows controls: the controls you'll use most often in your applications because they are the basic building blocks of typical rich client-user interfaces. Rather than look at controls' background and foreground color, font, and other trivial properties, we'll look at the properties unique to each control and see how these properties are used in building functional, rich user interfaces.