There are three main steps in creating a Visual Basic Application. These are:

1. Drawing the visual interface (What you see on the screen)
   • create a form (form is the VB word for a window)
   • add controls (buttons, text frames etc)
   • edit the properties of each control (properties set the name, size, colour etc for the control)
2. Write the code to control the program
3. Test and prepare your program for others to use.

Programming for a GUI (Graphical User Interface) is not as straight forward as programming a normal sequential program i.e. one that starts with the first line of code runs through every other line of code in sequence and finishes with the last line of code. Programming in a GUI introduces a random element....the USER!.

The user can go anywhere and do anything. Each custom control is also associated with a set of events. The most obvious is the click event associated with a button. Sets of instructions (called procedures) can be associated with different events. 

When Visual Basic starts, you can choose to start a new project, open an existing project or select a list of recently opened programs. A project is a collection of files that make up your application.

There are various types of applications we could create, however, we shall concentrate on creating Standard EXE programs (EXE means executable program). Click on the Standard EXE icon to go into the actual VB programming environment.  The design environment is a program that helps you to write code in the Visual Basic programming language. 

The actual design environment consists of:

• The Blank Form window in which you can design your application's interface
• The Project window  which displays the files that are created in your application
• The Properties window which displays the properties of various controls and objects that are created in your applications
• The Form Layout window which shows where the form sits on the screen 
• The Toolbox that contains the controls. Controls are tools such as boxes, buttons, labels and other objects you draw on a form
• Parts of the Visual Basic Window Video

This page has been produced by Margaret Meijers.  Questions or feedback may be directed by email to mmeijers at ictmindtools.net

 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.
Attribution should include the statement: "This has been adapted from a resource originally created by Margaret Meijers at http://ictmindtools.net"