In Chapter 2, we demonstrated tool tips—the helpful text that appears when the mouse hovers over an item in a GUI. Recall that the tool tips in Visual Studio (and most apps with GUIs) help you become familiar with the IDE’s features and serve as useful reminders for each toolbar icon’s functionality. This section demonstrates how to use the ToolTip component to add tool tips to your apps. Figure 14.31 describes common properties and a common event of class ToolTip.

When you add a ToolTip component from the Toolbox, it appears in the component tray—at the bottom of the window when the Form is in Design mode. Once a ToolTip is added to a Form, a new property appears in the Properties window for the Form’s other controls. This property appears in the Properties window as ToolTip on, followed by the name of the ToolTip component. For instance, if our Form’s ToolTip were named helpful-ToolTip, you would set a control’s ToolTip on helpfulToolTip property value to specify the control’s tool tip text. Figure 14.32 demonstrates the ToolTip component. For this example, we create a GUI containing two Labels, so we can demonstrate different tool tip text for each Label. Since there’s no event-handling code in this example, we do not show you the code for the Form class.

In this example, the IDE named the ToolTip component toolTip1. Figure 14.33 shows the ToolTip in the component tray. We set the tool tip text for the first Label to "First Label" and the tool tip text for the second Label to "Second Label". Figure 14.34 demonstrates setting the tool tip text for the first Label.