Programming in Visual Basic

Programming in VB

VB at a Glance

 Integrated Development Environment

1.0 The Integrated Development Environment

Learning the ins and outs of the Development Environment before you learn visual basic is somewhat like learning for a test you must know where all the functions belong and what their purpose is.

Visual Basic and its follow-up, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA - the scripting language for Microsoft Office Suite and about 100 other major Windows applications) pioneered and refined visual programming. Visual programming means that you paint the look and feel of your program and then tie together the forms, controls and overall processing with code and procedural code. The task of making the visual parts function as an effective whole program is expedited by templates, wizards and design tools within the Visual Basic IDE-Interactive Development Environ.

This is your visual development "canvas".

https://www.youtube.com/embed/xpqIdr5UPsg

Everytime you load a VB or VBA project, you will be greeted by roughly the layout shown in Figure 1 and these five GUI tools. The toolbox contains all the GUI elements/controls needed to create any VB form and the front end to all VB programs. For example, after the pointer tool there is the image control, label, textbox, frame and command button as the first five of 20 standard controls which are used constantly in VB programs. Another advanatge of these basic controls is that they fill 60-90% of all your programming needs and are automatically included in the VB runtime. It is possible to add many other Micrsoft supplied or third party ActiveX components/controls to this toolbox (including your own home-built control); but these added components can add significantly to the final size of your runtime.

The below diagram shows the development environment with all the important points labelled. Many of Visual basic functions work similar to Microsoft word eg the Tool Bar and the tool box is similar to other products on the market which work off a single click then drag the width of the object required. The Tool Box contains the control you placed on the form window. All of the controls that appear on the Tool Box controls on the below picture never runs out of controls as soon as you place one on the form another awaits you on the Tool Box ready to be placed as needed. First we will start with labelling the development environment