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Basic Windows Programming

In recent years, Visual Basic has won great acclaim for granting programmers the tools for creating highly detailed user interfaces via an intuitive form designer, along with an easy-to-learn programming language that together produced probably the best environment out there for Rapid Application Development. One of the advantages offered by Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool such as Visual Basic is that it provided access to a number of prefabricated controls that could be used to quickly build the user interface for an application.

At the heart of the development of most Visual Basic Windows applications is the form designer. You create a user interface by dragging and dropping controls from a Toolbox to your form, placing them where you want them to be when you run the program, double-clicking the control adds a handler for that control. The controls provided by Microsoft along with further custom controls that could be bought at reasonable prices have supplied programmers with an unprecedented pool of reusable, thoroughly tested code that is no more than a mouse click away. Such application development is now available to C# developers through Visual Studio.