Visual design surface |
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Visual C# Express provides a powerful WYSIWYG visual design surface to quickly and easily create interactive Windows applications.
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Toolbox |
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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!
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Property Window |
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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.
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You can also use the Properties Window to add or update a form and to control events by clicking on the “lightning” symbol at the top of the Property Window. The following diagram shows a list of events assigned to the Windows form. New events can be added by double-clicking on the name of the event.
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Snap lines |
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Visual C# 2005 Express Edition helps you make your application look “just right” with snap lines that assist you in laying out your forms. Snap lines are similar to magnetic anchors—and show up when you are placing a control on a form. As you start dragging, horizontal and/or vertical lines appear, helping you to line up the control with other controls that are 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.
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Toolstrip control |
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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 standard menu items, such as the File Open and File Save icons, in the Toolstrip by selecting Insert Standard Items from the Toolstrip Tasks.
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Menu control |
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The Menu and ContextMenuStrip controls enable you to easily add standard Microsoft Windows menus. As with the Toolstrip, select Insert Standard Items from the Menu Tasks to add the standard Windows menu options and icons.
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Container controls |
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If you are familiar with Web page development, you are probably are accustomed to the precision possible using HTML tables. With Visual Studio C# Express, you can have this same layout behavior in your Windows applications without worrying about exact coordinates. Visual C# Express offers two controls: TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel, located 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.
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WebBrowser control |
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Windows Forms applications consist primarily of controls such as buttons, lists, and labels. But with Visual Studio Express, you have 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.
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MaskedTextBox control |
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The MaskedTextBox control assists in validating user input, including 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.
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Background Worker |
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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.
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RichTextBox control |
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The RichTextBox control enables you to have more richly formatted text than your typical textbox. It includes the ability to format text with different fonts, sizes, and styles (bold, italic, or underline).
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NotifyIcon control |
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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. Then set properties and events for your utility, such as the default BalloonTipText or the Click event.
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TreeView control |
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Similar to the left pane in Windows Explorer, the TreeView control provides a way to show your application data in a tree-like view. Values in TreeView can be statically or dynamically populated by accessing the TreeView control programmatically.
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ListView control |
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Like the right pane in Windows Explorer, the ListView control displays data in a grid format with multiple views. The ListView contains pre-defined views, including the List, Details, Tile, SmallIcon and LargeIcon views.
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