PRG 240 Adv. VB Ch. 1 Notes

PRG 240, Advanced Visual Basic - Ch. 1 Notes

Objective #1: Identify the elements of the Visual Basic environment.

The Form window is your basic environment on which you place things that will be seen by the user.
The Project Explorer window shows the filenames of all of the form (.frm) and code (.bas) modules that are contained in your current project. You can think of this window as showing your .vbp project file's contents.
The Properties window allows you to set any property of the object which is currently selected (i.e. highlighted) in the form window.
The form layout window simply shows the position of the form as it would appear on the screen to the user. I usually close the form layout window while developing a VB program.
The Toolbox usually appears along the left edge of the screen. It contains the tools that you use to place controls on a form. You can double click a tool to cause a control to appear on the current form. You can also pass your mouse over each tool to see its name appear in a pop-up window.
The main Visual Basic window holds the menu bar (at the very top), the toolbar (just under the menu bar), and form location and size info.
The Help menu is a very useful and often overlooked repository of information. Use the online Help to learn about Visual Basic! You can also visit www.microsoft.com/msdn to access the online help for VB.

Objective #2: Customize your VB environment through the Tools/Options... menu command.

I recommend that you check the Require Variable Declaration checkbox on the Editor tab.
I also recommend that you choose the Full Module View so that you can see all of the procedures of a form on the screen.