Introduction to Creating Data Input Forms and Dialog Boxes

You may include several standard 32-bit ActiveX controls on your form to enhance your Visual Basic application's user interface. These controls organize data and provide different ways of presenting information to the user, give you additional means of displaying information about the environment, and also provide the means for you—as a developer—to manipulate data and controls.

Here is a brief description of what the ActiveX controls discussed in this chapter do:

* The ImageList control gives you a means of loading graphics files, such as icons and bitmaps, into your application for use with other controls.

* You can use the ListView control to organize data in lists.

* The ToolBar control lets you quickly build toolbars in your application, giving users an alternative to the menu for performing actions.

* You can add the StatusBar to a form to present information about the environment to the user through text messages and progress bars.

We then discuss control arrays that allow your application to dynamically create and destroy controls as the application runs.

Next we examine the related concept of a form's Controls Collection that you can use to manipulate controls without referencing each by name.

Turning our attention to the manipulation of forms, we first discuss the different techniques for managing forms programmatically.

Finally we talk about how to manipulate the loaded forms in an application without referencing each form by name. As you might expect from the earlier description of the Controls Collection, we will use the Forms Collection.