Building Windows Applications in VB.NET

• By Andy Baron, Duncan Mackenzie , Erik Porter, Joel Semeniuk
• Dec 5, 2003
• Sample Chapter is provided courtesy of Sams

This chapter is from the book
Microsoft Visual Basic .NET 2003 Kick Start

Chapter 3: Building Windows Applications

In This Chapter

• The Way Things Were

• The Windows Forms Model

• Handling Events in .NET

• Coding Without Control Arrays

• Configuring Your Form for Resizing

• Programming Without Default Form Instances

• Working with Multiple Forms in VB .NET

• In Brief

The Way Things Were

For most of Visual Basic's history, you did not need to specify you were building a rich-client application—all the applications you built were rich-client apps. Web development has never been the purpose of Visual Basic. This focus on developing stand-alone or client/server applications with a Windows user interface created a very tight bond between the VB language and the forms engine within it. There was no need to distinguish between the language and the tools for building an interface in VB6, but there certainly is in .NET.

In Visual Basic .NET, the technologies that enable you to create "standard" windows applications are part of the .NET Framework, available to any .NET language. This is a huge change from the way things were. In each of the following sections, before going into detail on how the new Forms technology works in Visual Basic .NET, I briefly describe some of the relevant details about Visual Basic 6.0 forms.