When Microsoft first released Visual Basic 1.0, developers fell in love with it because it made building the user interface components of an application very simple. Instead of having to write thousands of lines of code to display windows the very staple of a Windows application developers could simply “draw” the window on the screen.

In Visual Basic (any version), a window is known as a form. With the .NET Framework, this form design capability has been brought to all of the managed languages as Windows Forms. You’ve been using these forms over the course of the previous five chapters, but you haven’t really given that much thought to them focusing instead on the code that you’ve written inside them.

In this chapter, you’ll look in detail at Windows Forms and learn how you can use Visual Basic .NET to put together fully featured Windows applications. In particular, you will look at:

• Adding more features using buttons, text boxes, and radio buttons

• Creating a simple toolbar and toolbar buttons to respond to events

• Creating additional forms in a Windows Forms application

Chapter 6.1: Responding to Events

Chapter 6.2: Building a Simple Application

Chapter 6.3: Creating More Complex Applications

Chapter 6.4: Using Multiple Forms

Chapter 6.5: Summary