Visual Basic .NET for Beginners.pdf

7/26/2019 Visual Basic .NET for Beginners.pdf

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Visual Basic .NET for Beginners

First Things First

What is this course about?

This course is aboutprogramming usingthe Visual Basic language. It's written for complete

beginners so I have tried to explain everything. If you're an experienced programmer, you'll

probably discover that you already know a lot of what is in this course. But if you're

completely new to programming, this course is what you're looking for.

If you're looking for a morecomplete coursethat covers more advanced topics, I

recommend theVisual Basic .NET 2008 Express - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial.

LessonOne Contents


First Things First

What is this course about?

Programming

Visual Studio

Getting Ready to Program

Get VB.NET Express
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Programming

You may have heard that computers only understand 1's and 0's - binary numbers - and

that's true. How does a computer calculate spreadsheets, show web pages, run games, and

all the other things they do with just 1's and 0's?

Look at the screen in front of you with a magnifying glass. You'll see that it's really just a

series of tiny dots. Each dot is either light or dark. (Color is three dots - red, blue, or green -

in one place.) So whether a dot is light or dark can be controlled by just a 1 or a 0. When the

"processor" chip in a computer sees the right instruction, it will change the binary numbers

that control the image displayed on the screen. (This explanation boils a lot of technology

down to a reallysimple version, but it's still essentially correct.)

Thinking about the tiny dots on your screen again, you might be able to imagine just how

busy your computer must be trying to compute what each one should be. Remember that it

also has to work with pages coming in from the web, calculating how to display the cards inyour game of solitaire, and the thousands of other things all at the same time. Now think

about the job of sending the right commands to do all these things to the processor chip.

Sounds impossible, doesn't it? That it all works billions and billions of times every day all

over the world continues to amaze me.

Visual Basic is a program that creates other programs. Think of a program as being like a

factory that makes things. Some factories make things you use, like a new car. Other

factories make things that factories use, like a factory that makes welding machines that

make new cars. Visual Basic, and allprogramming languages,are like that second kind of

factory.

Visual Studio

Visual Basic is the name of theprogramming languagethat we'll use. Like other languages

(English, German, Swahili), it's really just a set of rules. Visual Studio is a "development

environment" that uses Visual Basic. So Visual Studio is actually the "program" I described

earlier. In practice, the two terms are often used to mean the same thing and that's the way

I use them.

Microsoft sells several different versions of Visual Studio with different capabilities. But allversions are called Visual Studio .NETbecause they all use a powerful set of programs called

the .NET Frameworkto do much of the hard work. All versions of Windows sold today

include the .NET Framework and you can add it to older versions such as Windows XP.

I said that we would useVisual Basic 2008 Express Edition.That's Microsoft's "official" name

for it but it's really just a version of Visual Studio. (Microsoft switches the names around

too.) If you buy one of their more expensive versions of Visual Studio, you'll see that it looks

almost exactly the same as the version we will use.
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Get VB.NET Express

Because Microsoft is constantly changing their site, I'm not going to give you an exact web

address to download VB.NET Express. Just go to their home page, Microsoft.com, and search

for "Visual Basic Express". That should take you right to the page you need. You'll see a lot of

other software that you can download and install too. Patience! If you're just getting started,

my advice is to do just one thing first.

Follow Microsoft's instructions on their site to download and install VB.NET Express. The

only cost is that you have to register with them to do it. You might also want to check their

System Requirements. If you're runningWindows XPor later, you should be just fine.

Get comfortable with Visual Studio

With VB.NET installed, start the program by clicking the "Visual Basic 2008 Express"icon in

your All Programs list.

You've started writing yourfirst program.

Here's the first page you see (for VB.NET Express 2008). The Start Page is just information

from Microsoft. You can close it immediately if you like.

To start programming, click theFile Menuand select "New Project..." then "Windows Forms

Application"then type over "WindowsApplication1" in the Name textbox and use a new name,

"SkipDays".
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VB.NET will respond by creating several files and folders on your computer and displaying a new

"Windows Form"in a window like this:

To better understand what's happening, stop right here and run yournew program.You might think

that you haven't written one yet, but you have. Or rather, VB.NET has. The files and folders that are

created automatically by VB.NET will run before you have written even one line of code.
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The program only includes the blank form that you can see already in the Design window,

but it will run.

To run the program in "Debug" mode, just press the F5 key on your computer. You can

move, resize, and close the form just like any other window so it is a real program. This

shows the form running:

When you exit the form (use the "X"in the control menujust like you would for any other window),

you should be back in VB.NET again and ready to startwriting the codethat will make your program

work.

The Skip Days program

There are times when you need to know exactly what day is 30 days, 90 days or 180 days

into the future. When you do, you have to find a calendar and startcounting days.It's easy

to make a mistake. The program we'll write will show you the exact day with one click of a

button.

What are the goals?

Understanding what a "Windows Forms Application" is

Learning how to use Visual Studio

Using a Visual Basic control

Understanding "event oriented" programming

Writing the programcode

Understanding what a "Windows Forms Application" is
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You can write any kind of program using VB.NET. Some programs are designed to work on

the web. Others work "behind the scenes" and you don't see them at all.

The next lesson discusses how to create these other types of programs. A "Windows Forms

Application" is the kind of program that is most familiar to you. The program works using a

window on a screen and familiar "objects" like buttons and textboxes.

VB.NET programs consist of "programming statements" that you can understand. Here are

two statements as an example:

Dim myVariable As String

myVariable = "A String"

After you have written your part of the program, VB.NET merges your part and the part

created automatically and then "compiles" the program. The word "compile" means that it is

converted from statements you can read into statements that are designed for the

computer to read. As we learned earlier, computers only understand 1's and 0's.

Compiling a program is the first step in turning it into 1's and 0's.

The first statement above reserved a name, "myVariable" so you can save information and

refer to it using that name. There are specific "types" of information that you have to use

when you write a program and "String" is one of them.

Another example is "Decimal". The second statement associates specific information with

the name you reserved. If you code a later statement:

Debug.WriteLine(myVariable)

VB.NET will displayA String in the Immediate Window because that's what the name

myVariable refers to.

Learning how to use Visual Studio

The statements in your part of the program are kept in a file that is similar to a file you might

makeusing Notepad.But VB.NET keeps everything organized for you and you can see it all in

theSolution Explorerpart of VB.NET. The illustration you saw earlier shows you whereSolution Explorer is in VB.NET. VB.NET uses the word "Solution" instead of "Program"

because a lot of programs can be combined together into a bigger program and they needed

a different word.

When you write a Windows Forms Application, you will select and customize the visual parts

of your program (the form and things like buttons and textboxes) using the Design window

that you have already seen. These parts of the program are already there for you to use in

the VB.NET Toolbox and they're called "components" or "controls". (A "control" is a

"component" that has a visible interface like a Button. A "component" doesn't have any

visible interface like a Timer.) You can see the Toolbox lurking over on the left side in aprevious illustration. Because you only need the Toolbox when you're adding controls to
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your application, it snaps out of the way when you're not using it. If you leave the mouse

pointer over the Toolbox, it will snap out. You can then click and drag controls onto your

form. When you do that, VB.NET adds the programming for the control to your Solution.

(Just a note of history here. This innovation of adding controls to a program by dragging

them from a Toolbox was the thing that made the very first version of Visual Basic such a hitbecause, for the first time, programmers didn't have to write the detailed code to create the

controls themselves.)

We're going to jump right in and add allof the controls that our SkipDays program will need

right now. This may be confusing if it's your first time and you may need to do it more than

once to get it right. If you get totally confused, close VB.NET and "Discard" the program and

start over. No problem. You're here to learn.

1. Make sure that the Design Window is displayed

2.

Open the Toolbox and find the MonthCalendar control3. Left-click and drag the MonthCalendar control to the form and release the mouse

button to drop it on the form.

4. Find the Button control. Drag and drop it on the form.

5. Find the GroupBox control. Drag and drop it on the form.

6. Find the RadioButton control. Drag and drop it on the GroupBox control. Drag and

drop two more RadioButton controls onto the GroupBox control.

That's all we'll need. Here's the way my program looks after doing that. Notice that I didn't

bother to arrange the controls neatly (we'll do that next). I just dropped them anywhere on

the form (except for the RadioButton controls - they have to be dropped on the Groupbox).The MonthCalendar control isn't even fully on the form. Even though you haven't written a

line of code yet, the program still runs. You can click F5 again and see. (I show mine running

in the lower right corner.)


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Here's where you put your "designer" hat on. Arrange all the controls so they look good on

the form.

You can move all of the controls around on the form after selecting them (by clicking inside

them). A control is "selected" when you can see the "sizing handles" around the edge. (The

MonthCalendar control only has three. The RadioButton controls only have one.) You candrag a control when the mouse pointer turns into a four-way arrow. Visual Studio helps by

snappping them in place when they're lined up with other controls or the form. Notice that

when you move the GroupBox control, all of the RadioButton controls move with it. That's

why you dropped them on the GroupBox control. Adjust the RadioButton controls inside the

GroupBox but make sure you don't move them outside or they won't work the way we want

them to.

Here's my form after I arranged all the controls. Yours doesn't have to look just like mine.

You can design it any way you like.

The MonthCalendar control is a fairly complex piece of work, but there are actually controls

that are even more complex in the Toolbox. We'll use this control to learn about another

part of VB.NET: the Properties window.

The individual windows, such as Properties, can be resized and moved around to make them

easier to work with. I dragged the Properties window out into the middle of VB.NET in theillustration below.


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Text: Days To Skip

RadioButton1

Name: skip30

Text: 30 Days

Checked: True

RadioButton2

Name: skip90

Text: 90 Days

RadioButton3

Name: skip180

Text: 180 Days

Those are the only properties you have to change! Most properties can be changed at

"runtime" (when your program is running) too. For example, you can change the Text

property at runtime.

skip90.Text = "Skip Town"

Both Methods (explained later) and Properties are identified in program code using the

"dot" notation. This statement changes the Text property for the control named skip90.

Understanding "event oriented" programming

Most programs today are "event oriented". This means that after the program starts

running, it normally just waits around for something to happen that it "knows" how to

respond to. For example, clicking a button. A program "knows" how to respond to an event

when there is an "event subroutine"for that event in VB.NET.

A subroutine is one of the fundamental unitsof program codein a VB.NET program. Here's a

Clickevent subroutine for a Button controlnamed Button1:

Private Sub Button1_Click( _

ByVal sender As System.Object, _

ByVal e As System.EventArgs) _

Handles Button1.Click

' ... program code goes here ...

End Sub

The underscore characters at the ends of the lines are "continuation characters". They allow

you to break one long statement into several shorter lines. I have to use them here because

space is limited on the web page.

All of the code above is entered for you by VB.NET. All you have to do is double click on the

control in the Design window andthe Code windowwill open automatically with the default

event for that control already coded. (Click is the default event for a Button control.) The

automatically entered code can be very useful (other articles here explain how to use it ) but

when you're just getting started, you can ignore it all and just enter your program code.
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You can see all of the available events for a control in the Code window. Let's look at the

events you can use for a Button control. This isn't necessary to write the rest of the program,

but it's a good time to pause and see what's available.

1. Click the View Code icon in the Solution Explorer toolbar.

(It's just to the left of the View Designer icon that was shown in a previousillustration.)

There are two "dropdown textboxes" above the code window. The one on the left is

called the "Class Name" box and the one on the right is the "Method Name" box.

2. Click the down arrow on the right side of the Class Name box to display the selection

list and then select skipAhead (the name we gave the Button control) in the

dropdown that pops open.

3. Click the down arrow on the right side of the "Method Name" box. A long list of

events will pop up. In general, you can write your own code for any of these events

and make your program do just about whatever you can think of.

If you then click any of the events in the Method Name box, VB.NET will automatically enter all the

event subroutine code you need for that event into the code window too. This is an alternative to

double-clicking the control in design view as described a little earlier. Double-clicking the control in

design view will only work for the default event.

Up to this point, we stillhave not written any code for the SkipDays program. You may have

accidentally created event subroutines while you were looking around. If you did, just

highlight and delete them in the code window. (Leave the Public Class SkipDays - End Class

statements there, however.) But now it's time to write some of our own code.


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Using the Class Name and Method Name dropdown textboxes as described above, select the

skipAhead control and the Click Event again so VB.NET will create the event subroutine for

the Click event again.

Then enter this code in the subroutine:

If skip30.Checked = True Then

MonthCalendar1.SetSelectionRange( _

Today.AddDays(30), _

Today.AddDays(30))

ElseIf skip90.Checked = True Then



Today.AddDays(90))

ElseIf skip180.Checked = True Then



Today.AddDays(180))End If

This is the only code we need to write to make the whole program work because the really

difficult coding is part of the control. The code we do have to write is an example of

"conditional statements". One of the main things you have to do as a programmer is decide

how to control the program with conditions. In this case, we select a date on the

MonthCalendar control based on which RadioButton is clicked.

But it's not quite that easy. You might be asking questions like, "Why is 'Today.AddDays'

there twice?" and "Why did you use the 'SetSelectionRange' method?" These are all good

questions. Let me ask you one: "How do you say, "Today is the first day of the rest of your

life." in the Swahili language?"

You say you don't speak Swahili? Neither do I. But I do speak Visual Basic because I've

studied it for years. This is an example of what you have to learn to "speak" it.

But there is a lotof help right at your fingertips. One of the first sources of help is

"Intellisense". VB.NET will suggest all of the members that you might be looking for as soon

as you enter the "dot" in the "dotted notation" above.

To see how this works, enter

skipAhead.

into the code just before the End Sub statement. As soon as you enter the "dot" a window

should open that displays the members - methods and properties - available for a Button

control. You'll see the Name and Text properties there, for example. You'll notice that a lot

of other "pop-up" help is available as you move your mouse around the code window too.


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The Help system for VB.NET is exceptionally complete as well. It's amazing, especially when

you think about how much you paid for it. (Nothing!)

And ... of course ... I recommend that you check out the articles and tips available at About

Visual Basic, too!

At this point, your first program is complete, but it's far from perfect. For your first

homework assignment, change the code to go to your birthday for any year!

Lesson 2 of an About Visual Basic Tutorial

This course is about programming using the Visual Basic language. It's written for complete

beginners so I have tried to explain everything. If you're an experienced programmer, you'll

probably discover that you already know a lot of what is in this course. But if you're

completely new to programming, this course is what you're looking for.

The version of Visual Basic we'll use is called Visual Basic 2008 Express Editionand it is totallyfree and the course is totally free too.

You can download all of the software you will need from Microsoft.

If you're looking for a more complete course that covers more advanced topics, I

recommend theVisual Basic .NET 2008 Express - A "From the Ground Up" Tutorial.

Lesson Two Content


Visual Studio in More DepthThe Visual Studio GUI
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The windows and

panes of Visual Studio

Clicking with Visual Studio

The Visual Studio Project Types

Everything is an object

Properties and the Design Window

What's in a Windows Forms Application?The Form file and the Form object

Project properties

A Label that remembers your birthday

If you're looking for the first Lesson to start at the beginning of this tutorial, click here:

Lesson One.

Visual Studio in More Depth

Lesson 1 was a rapid fire introduction to VB.NET where we built a complete application that

displayed a date on a calendar. It didn't involve actually writing very much code, but you had

to use a lot of features of VB.NET and Visual Studio to get the job done. In this lesson, we're

going to concentrate on explaining all about those features and more. But since

programming is writing code, at the end of the lesson, we'll add a feature to the program

from Lesson 1 to display a message on a particular date. You could use it to remember your

birthday!

The Visual Studio GUI

GUI is Graphical User Interface.

In the decades that I've been programming, acronyms have always been a big part of it so

you might as well get used to using and knowing a lot of them. Often, there are several that

can mean the same thing. For example, I could have written "Visual Studio IDE" for

Integrated Development Environment.

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Both of these mean the windows and tools that are all in the bag called "Visual Studio .NET".

We used a lot of them last time and we'll use more now.

As I noted last time, for our purposes here, Visual Studio .NET and Visual Basic .NET are

really the same thing. The versions of Visual Studio that you have to buy include other

languages in addition to Visual Basic. But Visual Basic .NET Express only supports Visual

Basic. It is actually a remarkably complete version of Visual Studio, however. If you decide tobuy a copy of Visual Studio, you'll find that the Visual Basic part of it is virtually identical.
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ic.about.com%2Fod%2Flearnvsnet%2Fa%2Fecvbnet20201.htm&title=Beginning%2520Tutorial%2520to%2520Learn%2520Visual%2520Basic%2520.NET%2520-%25202&google_rt=ChBXOJrdAAoaWAoWKUwJAtRwEhNFeGNlbCBmb3IgQmVnaW5uZXJzGggJzw1F_Xyu_SgBUhMIlue1yLfczAIVSp8WCh0ArAL9http://visualbasic.about.com/z/js/o.htm?k=basic%20java%20tutorial&SUName=visualbasic&d=Basic%20Java%20Tutorial&r=http%3A%2F%2Fvisualbasic.about.com%2Fod%2Flearnvsnet%2Fa%2Fecvbnet20201.htm&title=Beginning%2520Tutorial%2520to%2520Learn%2520Visual%2520Basic%2520.NET%2520-%25202&google_rt=ChBXOJrdAAoaVgoWKUwJAtRwEhNCYXNpYyBKYXZhIFR1dG9yaWFsGggEzqEk3JsLoigBUhMIlue1yLfczAIVSp8WCh0ArAL9http://visualbasic.about.com/z/js/o.htm?k=programming%20tutorial&SUName=visualbasic&d=Programming%20Tutorial&r=http%3A%2F%2Fvisualbasic.about.com%2Fod%2Flearnvsnet%2Fa%2Fecvbnet20201.htm&title=Beginning%2520Tutorial%2520to%2520Learn%2520Visual%2520Basic%2520.NET%2520-%25202&google_rt=ChBXOJrdAAoaTAoWKUwJAtRwEhRQcm9ncmFtbWluZyBUdXRvcmlhbBoIfjDx53dwsTIoAVITCJbntci33MwCFUqfFgodAKwC_Qhttp://visualbasic.about.com/od/learnvsnet/a/ecvbnet20201.htmhttp://visualbasic.about.com/od/learnvsnet/a/blecvbnet20101.htm


16/28

The windows and panes of Visual Studio

Visual Studio is mainly a series of different windows that all work together. The main

windows are:

The Design and Code windows The Solution Explorer Window

The Properties Window

The Debug windows, Immediate and Output

The Toolbox window

You might find some sources that call these "panes" instead of "windows". We'll just call

them "windows" here.

All of these windows except the Design and Code windows can be set in one of five different

"operational modes":

Floating

Dockable

Tabbed Document

AutoHide

Hide

As you advance in your programming skills, you'll discover that Visual Studio offers much

more. I still find tools in Visual Studio that I didn't know about.

The illustration below shows all of them as "Floating". You can click and drag them around

the screen or close them. Right click on the title bar to change from one mode to another.


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In the Floating mode, you can "dock" these windows against any side of the screen or even stack

several on one side (where they become "tabbed documents" on that side). You might have had

trouble with docking in earlier software (for example, the Windows Taskbar can be "docked" too)because it was so 'touchy' and hard to use. Visual Studio gives you an onscreen aid called "guide

diamonds" that make it simple.


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My advice is to stick to the startup defaults for now. But don't be concerned about

experimenting to see what the different modes look like. You can always straighten out your

experiments by selecting "Reset Window Layout" from the Window menu.

One final tip ... AutoHide can be a little confusing to beginners too. This makes the window

collapse into the margin and pop out automatically when the mouse pointer hovers over the

tab for the window in the margin. Beginners sometimes get into a "whack a mole" mode

with these windows in AutoHide mode because they can't figure out how to keep the darn

window visible while they select something in it. The solution is to either "pin" the window

open (look for a pushpin in the title bar) or double click the tab in the margin. Either will

keep the window open while you select something.

Instructions for using software often just say, "click the mouse" but that too can be

confusing. Left-clicking gives you a completely different result than right-clicking; and

double-clicking is usually quite different than single-clicking.

There is a logic to left-clicking versus right-clicking (and this is true of nearly all Windows

software). Left-clicking always "does" something. You click a button to do whatever the

button does.

You click a down arrow to move something down or open a drop-down box. The point is,

something happens as a result. But right-clicking usually simply opens a "context menu" that

gives you more choices. The choices you get depend on the "context" where you right-click.

If you right-click inside a form, a different menu of choices will be displayed than if you click

in the Properties window ...


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and the same for all the other windows. So if you want to do something with a window on

the screen, but you don't see that choice available anywhere, try right-clicking. What you

want to do may be in the context menu.

I just wrote that left-clicking "does something". When you single-click the left button, you

usually "select" whatever the mouse pointer is over. When you double-click things, you maybe asking Visual Studio to do something more involved. In the case of components in the

design window, you will open the code window and create the default event code for that

component. So avoid double-clicking unless that's what you want to do.

The Visual Studio Project Types

When you select "New Project", you are given a default selection of five different types of

projects that you can create with Visual Basic Express 2008:

1.

Windows Forms Application2. Class Library

3. WPF Application

4. WPF Browser Application

5. Console Application

There's also a "Search Online Templates" icon, but that has never resulted in anything in my

experience. Sometimes, Microsoft creates blind alleys.

This tutorial primarily uses Windows Forms and Lesson 1 described them

Keep reading and you'll know a lot more about them.

WPF is "Windows Presentation Framework" and it's a completely new way to "present"

systems to the people who use them. Microsoft uses the word "presentation" because they

have opened it up to much more than just images on screens. Microsoft defines it this way:

"Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides developers with a unified programming

model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media,

and documents."

It's a huge and very new technology and most people expect WPF to replace Windows Forms

at some point. But it might take quite a few years. You can find articles explaining WPF here

at About Visual Basic. Just use our integrated search facility to search for WPF at this site.

A Class Library is a collection of software "objects" that can be used to do things inside a

program. The .NET Framework itself is just a mammoth collection of class libraries. You can

code your own as you advance in your skill as a programmer.

A Console Application is a program that does nothave a GUI. (Both Windows Forms and WPF

create a GUI. The the first part of this lesson for an explanation of GUI.) To use a Console

Application, you have to use the Commmand Prompt "DOS" emulation built into Windows.

People sometimes use them to create "lightweight" (low memory and CPU use) applications


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that can run even when Windows can't. For example, a lot of communications (TCPIP and

FTP) and other system utility programs are written as Console Applications.

Keep reading and you'll know a lot more about them.

WPF is "Windows Presentation Framework" and it's a completely new way to "present"systems to the people who use them. Microsoft uses the word "presentation" because they

have opened it up to much more than just images on screens. Microsoft defines it this way:

"Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) provides developers with a unified programming

model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media,

and documents."

It's a huge and very new technology and most people expect WPF to replace Windows Forms

at some point. But it might take quite a few years. You can find articles explaining WPF here

at About Visual Basic. Just use our integrated search facility to search for WPF at this site.

A Class Library is a collection of software "objects" that can be used to do things inside a

program. The .NET Framework itself is just a mammoth collection of class libraries. You can

code your own as you advance in your skill as a programmer.

A Console Application is a program that does nothave a GUI. (Both Windows Forms and WPF

create a GUI. The the first part of this lesson for an explanation of GUI.) To use a Console

Application, you have to use the Commmand Prompt "DOS" emulation built into Windows.

People sometimes use them to create "lightweight" (low memory and CPU use) applications

that can run even when Windows can't. For example, a lot of communications (TCPIP and

FTP) and other system utility programs are written as Console Applications.

Everything is an object

Programming today is almost exclusively "object oriented" (OOP). A very fast definition of a

softwareobject is software that includes data (properties) and can do things (methods). A

button is an object because it includes data like the size, name, and text on the button and

when you click it, a program starts running. You can study objects in depth in books written

about the concept, but this simple understanding will do just fine to get started. In general,

everything in .NET programming is an object. VB.NET includes a tool that is used exclusively

to find information about objects called the "Object Browser". It's usually on the Visual

Studio toolbar but you can also find it under the View menu.

The Object browser will give you information about all of the objects in the .NET Framework.

All of the methods (what an object can do), properties (data in an object) as well as the

events (subroutines that can be started by changes that the object detects) are listed there

in one place. You can use this tool to learn about unfamiliar objects and look for ways that

objects are used. Just for practice, you might want to search for MonthCalendar, the

component we learned about in the previous lesson.

Properties and the Design Window


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In Lesson 1, we changed all of the Properties of the control objects that we added to our

project before doing anything else. That's a good habit to learn. Some of the properties of

objects can be difficult to change after a lot of code has been written, so getting their values

correct to start with is important. The Properties window only shows the properties of

objects when the Design window (not the Code window) is selected because you can't select

a specific object in the Code window and Visual Studio can't determine what control objectto display properties for.

The Name is an example of an object property that should always be changed as soon as the

object is added. The Visual Studio Property window sorts Name to the top of the Properties

window by adding parenthesis around it because the character "(" sorts before alpha

characters. You should change the Text property immediately as well.

When you use the Windows Forms Applicaton template for a new project, Visual Studio adds

a whole hierarchy of files to your project to support the forms. Some of the files are hidden

because you will never change them. But knowing about them will help you understand howVisual Basic projects work. And sometimes you might need to look a what's in them to find

difficult bugs. The files that are added for a Windows Forms Application are different than

the files for other templates.

That's what makes the templates different.

You can see all of the files, including the hidden files, by clicking the Show All Files icon in the

Solution Explorer window. The illustration below shows all of the default files for a project,

as well as some things (such as References) that aren't files.


22/28

Just to complete your understanding about how things work, the files and code for the project can be

seen outside of Visual Studio (after the project is saved). This illustration shows The files in Windows

Explorer and the default code for the Load event of a form in Notepad. You can see the code in

Notepad is the same as the code in the Code Window of Visual Studio. However .... It's alwaysa bad

idea to change your program outside Visual Studio. Visual Studio keeps everything coordinated. If

you change the program outside Visual Studio, for example in Notepad as shown here, you willamost always get things totally messed up.


23/28

You will need to know where things are is to do things like copying the executable (the end result of

programming and compiling a VB.NET program) to another location; or understand how to code the

file path to other files that you might reference in your project, such as a data file that has to be

opened and read.

The executable for your project is in the Debug or Release Folder for the project. An executable is a

".EXE" file (a program a user can run) or a ".DLL" file (a component that can be used by other

components or programs) and you can "Run" it directly from Windows. The illustration shows a

default WindowsApplication1 .EXE program being run in Windows.


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The Form file and the Form object

You'll notice that if you add a new component to your project, such as the MonthCalendar

that we added in Lesson 1, no new files are added to the project. The reason is that the code

for these components is stored inside the file for the form. (Actually, most of the code is in

the .NET Framework, but some local code is created to make the object unique for your

project.) So, in addition to holding all of the code for the form object in your program, the

form file does double duty by holding the code for a lot of the rest of your project. That's

why the form "file" has a different properties window than the form "object". The

illustration below shows the different properties

You can select the form file properties by selecting the form in the Solution Explorerwindow. Visual Studio does it's best to change the object Name to match the file Name, but

if you change the Name in both places, is won't be the same. This is another reason to pick a

fundamental property values, like Name, as soon as you add them and then avoid changing

them. Inside the code for the form, VB.NET insists that you refer to the form object as "Me"

instead of using the actual name:

Me.Location = (New System.Drawing.Point(400, 400))

(Location is a property of the form. Point is an object that we haven't learned about yet.

System.Drawing is the namespace where the Point object can be found in the .NET


25/28

Framework. New is a method, called the "constructor" method, of objects that is used to

create a copy of the object for your program.)

Project properties

Just like the Form has it's own properties, so does the project. In fact, the project propertiesare extensive and can be quite technical. You can display a window for the project properties

by selecting it in the Project menu or by right-clicking the Project in Solution Explorer and

selecting Properties from the context menu.

The illustration below shows that there are eleven different tabs in the Project Properties

window. That's a lot of properties!!

A complete description of project properties is a more advanced topic.

Programmers write code. So we still need to write some for this lesson.

In Lesson 1, we wrote a very simple program that would display a date 30, 90, or 180 days

from the current date. I suggested that you might think about how to change the program to

go to your birthday at the very end. In this lesson, we'll start with the program that you

coded in the first lesson and add a label that pops up if the date you go to happens to beyour birthday.


26/28

Computers are clever, but they can't figure out what your birthday is unless you tell them.

The first thing to add to the code is a way to tell the computer what your birthday is. In this

particular case, I'm using a new statement: Const. This is a way of telling VB.NET about a

value that will never change; in other words, a "constant".

We'll see a different constant supplied by Visual Basic just a little later. I add this Const to theSkipDays class outsideall of the subroutines at the top of the code. This makes the entire

SkipDays class the "scope" of the Const. In other words, all of the procedures in the class will

be able to use the same Const. The Const is coded like this:

Private Const myBDay As Date _

= #12/7/1941#

Notice that this is of type Date and that when a date is assigned to the Const, it's enclosed in

the "#" symbols. Just as strings are enclosed in double quote marks in Visual Basic, dates are

enclosed in pound symbols. That way, Visual Basic knows how to process them correctly.

Just one note on program design ...

Coding something like this as a Const in the source code of the program is actually very bad

design. If anyone else uses the program, the source code will have to be changed to a new

date and the program will have to be recompiled. That's terrible design!! A much better way

to do this would be to make this a parameter that is passed into the program from a

configuration file.

And more advanced courses on this site show you how to do that.) I'm doing it this way to

demonstrate how VB.NET works, not as an example of great programming.

Our modifications to the program will cause a big banner display to pop up the first timethe

program calculates a date on the same month and day as the date in myBDay. The banner

can be dismissed again with a button.

To show the banner, add a Label component and then add a button to dismiss the banner. I

named the banner label BDayGreet and the button BDayOK. I changed the background of

the label to the color Fuchsia and I also changed the font Name and Size. And - very

important - I set the Visible property to False so they will only be displayed when I want

them to be.

But I didn't change the Text to my chosen greeting: "Happy Birthday To You!!". Why?

Because there is no way to make the greeting appear on multiple lines by changing it in the

Properties Window. If I had put it in the Text property using the Properties Window, it would

all be on one long line and I want it to be on three lines so the banner is in a square that will

cover the face of the MonthCalendar control.

But there isa way. This falls under the heading of programming tips and tricks. You'll learn

lots of these as you gain skill as a programmer.


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One of the events that you can use is the form Load event. This is a good way to do what is

called "initialization" ... setting things up for the program. In the form Load event subroutine,

I added the statement:

BDayGreet.Text = _

"Happy" & vbCrLf & _"Birthday" & vbCrLf & _

"To You!!"

vbCrLf is a Visual Basic constant - one of many that you can use in your code. This particular

one is equal to "carriage return line feed" characters. The use of these characters to force a

new line goes back to the earliest days of programming - well before PC's were even

dreamed of - but it's still supported. I use the "concatenation" operator "&" to insert a CrLf

at the end of each line I want to appear and put that in the Text property when the form is

loaded.

To control the display of the banner, I add this code afterthe new date is calculated:

If _

MonthCalendar1.SelectionRange.Start.Day = _

myBDay.Day And _

MonthCalendar1.SelectionRange.Start.Month = _

myBDay.Month And _

DidItAlready = False Then

BDayGreet.Visible = True

BDayOK.Visible = True

End If

(Just a reminder ... I use a lot of continuation characters - underscores - in my example code

to keep the lines short so they will fit on the web page here. You don't have to use them if

you copy this code.)

In words, the code above states that if the myBDay Day and Month is equal to the one

calculated, make the label and button visible. And change this other variable "DidItAlready"

to false. What's that all about?

Once the banner is dismissed (we'll code that next), I don't want this code to pop it up again.

So I use this variable to make sure it only happens once. The variable also has to be declared

in the same place that the Const was declared so it will also have class level scope:

Private DidItAlready As Boolean = False

The last thing we have to code is the Click event subroutine for the button to dismiss the

banner:

Private Sub BDayOK_Click( _

ByVal sender As System.Object, _

ByVal e As System.EventArgs) _

Handles BDayOK.Click

BDayGreet.Visible = FalseBDayOK.Visible = False


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DidItAlready = True

End Sub

The end result looks like this when you hit your birthday:

Here's a download for the updated program in case you want to see exactly how I did it.

Download the code.
http://visualbasic.about.com/library/download/SkipDays.ziphttp://visualbasic.about.com/library/download/SkipDays.ziphttp://visualbasic.about.com/library/download/SkipDays.zip

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