Many of today’s commercial apps provide GUIs that are easy to use and manipulate. Because of this demand for user-friendly GUIs, the ability to design sophisticated GUIs is an essential programming skill. Visual Studio’s IDE makes GUI development quick and easy. In Chapters 14 and 15, we presented basic Windows Forms GUI development techniques. In Chapter 15, we demonstrated how to create menus, which provide users easy access to an app’s functionality. You learned the DateTimePicker
and MonthCalendar
controls, which allow users to input date and time values. We demonstrated LinkLabel
s, which are used to link the user to an app or a web page. You used several controls that provide lists of data to the user—ListBox
es, CheckedListBox
es and ListView
s. We used the ComboBox
control to create drop-down lists, and the TreeView
control to display data in hierarchical form. We then introduced complex GUIs that use tabbed windows and multiple document interfaces. The chapter concluded with demonstrations of visual inheritance and creating custom controls. In Chapter 16, we introduce string
and character processing.