Working with the Controls

The Control Properties

Before writing an event procedure for the control to response to a user's input, you have to set certain properties for the control to determine its appearance and how it will work with the event procedure. You can set the properties of the controls in the properties window or at runtime.

Figure 3.1 on the right is a typical properties window for a form. You can rename the form caption to any name that you like best. In the properties window, the item appears at the top part is the object currently selected (in Figure 3.1, the object selected is Form1). At the bottom part, the items listed in the left column represent the names of various properties associated with the selected object while the items listed in the right column represent the states of the properties. Properties can be set by highlighting the items in the right column then change them by typing or selecting the options available.

For example, in order to change the caption, just highlight Form1 under the name Caption and change it to other names. You may also try to alter the appearance of the form by setting it to 3D or flat. Other things you can do are to change its foreground and background color, change the font type and font size, enable or disable minimize and maximize buttons and etc.

You can also change the properties at runtime to give special effects such as change of color, shape, animation effect and so on. For example the following code will change the form color to red every time the form is loaded. VB uses hexadecimal system to represent the color. You can check the color codes in the properties windows which are showed up under ForeColor and BackColor .

Private Sub Form_Load()

Form1.Show
Form1.BackColor = &H000000FF&

End Sub

Another example is to change the control Shape to a particular shape at runtime by writing the following code. This code will change the shape to a circle at runtime.

Private Sub Form_Load()

Shape1.Shape = 3

End Sub