Visual Basic Express provides a powerful WYSIWYG visual design surface to quickly and easily create interactive Windows applications.

The Toolbox contains drag-and-drop controls and components to create your Windows applications. Controls are grouped into logically-named categories like Menus and Toolbars, Data, Common Dialogs and more. Adding controls to Windows Forms is as easy as clicking and dragging the control onto the form!

The Property Window enables you to view and change the properties and events of components in your application. The Property Window is context sensitive and will pre-populate menu options depending on the values you are changing. For example, changing the background color of a Windows form displays a color picker to easily change the selected value.

Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition helps you make your application look “just right” by adding snap lines to assist you in laying out your forms. Snap lines are like magnetic anchors that show up when you are placing a control on a form. As you start dragging, lines that allow horizontal and/or vertical alignment appear, letting you line up the control with other controls already on the form.

The following diagram shows both horizontal and vertical snap lines that help align the newly added button with the Compare Categories button and the Products ListBox control.

Applications like Microsoft Office also take advantage of Toolstrip controls, which provide strips of buttons that can be docked to the edges of the window. With the ToolStrip control, you can build toolbars containing your choice of buttons, text boxes, combo boxes and more. You can easily add the standard menu items, like the File Open and Save icons in the Toolstrip by selecting Insert Standard Items from the Toolstrip Tasks.

The Menu and ContextMenuStrip controls enable you to easily add standard Microsoft Windows menus. Like the Toolstrip, you can also select Insert Standard Items from the Menu control Tasks to add the standard Windows menu options and icons as shown in the diagram.

If you are familiar with Web page development, you are probably used to the default flow layout, and the preciseness possible using HTML tables. With Visual Studio Express, you can bring this same layout behavior to your Windows applications without worrying about exact coordinates. Visual Basic offers two controls: TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel. They are found in the Containers tab of the ToolBox.

The TableLayoutPanel control lets you handle layout in Windows Forms based on flexible rows and columns in a table. The FlowLayoutPanel control allows content to flow freely on a form as it resizes, even moving from one line to another.

view larger >

Windows Forms applications consist primarily of controls such as buttons, lists, and labels, but using Visual Studio Express, you can open up entirely new possibilities by directly integrating a Web browser right into your application. This is done using the WebBrowser control. Just like Button and ListBox controls, the WebBrowser control can be dragged onto a form from the Toolbox and accessed from code. This makes it easy to display Web pages without launching a separate browser window, allowing a great degree of control over how the browser behaves and what the user can do with it.

view larger >

The MaskedTextBox control assists in validating user input, like date of birth, social security numbers, email addresses, and even your own custom data. The following diagram shows setting an input mask for a text box by selecting the data format and data type from a built-in list. You can choose to enforce the data type by checking the Use Validating Type check box.

The Background Worker is a component that makes it easy to have your application do two things (or more) at the same time. For example, you can use the Background Worker component to call a Web service or start a long file download in the background without “freezing” your application while the task is completed.

The RichTextBox control is a control that enables you to have much richer formatted text then your typical textbox and include the ability to format text using different fonts, sizes, and styles such as bold, italic, or underline.

The NotifyIcon control enables you to easily build Windows System Tray applications or utilities. Simply drag and drop the NotifyIcon control onto your Windows Form and set properties and events for your utility like the default BalloonTipText or the Click event.

view larger >

Like the left pane in Windows Explorer, the TreeView control provides a way to show your application data in a Tree-like view. Values in the TreeView can be statically or dynamically populated by accessing the TreeView control programmatically.

Like the right pane in Windows Explorer, the ListView control displays data in a grid format with multiple views. The ListView contains predefined views like the List, Details, Tile, SmallIcon and LargeIcon views.