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To access the contents, click the chapter and section titles.
Visual Basic 6 Programming Blue Book: The Most Complete, Hands-On Resource for Writing Programs with Microsoft Visual Basic 6!
Other Visual DesignYou should know a few other visual design tricks:
A Control GalleryNow that you know how to place and arrange controls on a form, its time for a brief overview of some of the controls that Visual Basic provides. This is not intended to be a detailed summary of the entire Visual Basic control set. My goal is simply to make you aware of the most fundamental of the controls, those that are used most often. Youll be meeting the other controls later in the book. Figure 3.2 illustrates the more commonly used Visual Basic controls. Commonly used Visual Basic controls include:
This list includes only eight of Visual Basics controls, which are an integral part of the Visual Basic development environment and are always displayed in the toolbox. Visual Basic also supports custom controls, drop-in components that represent one of the foundations of the software component philosophy. Most custom controls are a special category of object called ActiveX controls. You can control which of the available custom controls are displayed in the toolbox by selecting Components from the Project menu and clicking on the Controls tab in the dialog box that is displayed. As shown in Figure 3.3, this tab lists all of the custom controls that you have available. Only those controls and objects with an X in the box next to their name will be displayed as buttons in the toolbox. While you can click on the boxes to turn the option on or off, you cannot remove a control that is used in your project (i.e., has been placed on a form). My system offers 39 custom controls, and displaying all of them all the timealong with the 20 intrinsic controlswould result in a confusing and unwieldy toolbox. In addition, many of the custom controls are rather specialized, so you can see why Visual Basic lets you determine which controls are displayed in the toolbox.
What about the other two tabs in this dialog box? Both insertable objects and designers are like custom controls in two respects: They are software components that you can use in your Visual Basic projects, and they display as icons in the toolbox. How are they different? A custom control, or an ActiveX control, is a self-contained component that depends only on its OCX file. It has no use except for being dropped in a Visual Basic program (or a program being created with another development tool that supports custom controls). In contrast, an insertable object represents a data object that is supported by an existing application on your system. An insertable object is available to your Visual Basic programs only if the corresponding application is installed on your system. For example, you can create a chart in Microsoft Excel and then insert the chart into your Visual Basic program. People using your programs, however, will be able to use the inserted object only if they also have the application on their system.
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