Creating Forms


A Windows application is a collection of related forms that allows users to interact easily with the data. As you might have seen in other Windows applications, some applications can be very useful, but boring to look at or use. Throughout this tutorial, you've brought many Visual Basic objects together to create simple applications that were interesting to look at. By using what you've learned about VB's features, in addition to some design standards that you'll learn here, you can create useful applications that look good and are easy to use. However, no matter how closely standards are followed, an application's forms, to some degree, reflect the personality of the programmer who created them.

For the rest of this hour and the next, I'm going to cover how to design a form, what you should place on the form, and where the objects should be placed. Also, you'll see how the menus are created and how they enhance the application.

Remember that this part of the book is a Fast Track part. Therefore, some of you are reading this but haven't mastered all the previous hours' topics. Therefore, along the way, this and the next four lessons review some of the application-creation process as well as describe application design theory.