As with most of today's Windows applications, Visual Basic supports a wide range of toolbars. Select View|Toolbars to see a list of available toolbars. Each one that is currently showing will appear with a checkmark by its name. The Form Window: Where It All Happens The Form window is your primary work area. Although the Form window first appears small relative to the rest of your screen, the Form window comprises the background of your application. In other words, if you write a Windows-based calculator with Visual Basic, the calculator's buttons all reside on the Form window and when someone runs the calculator, the calculator that appears is really just the application's Form window with components placed there and tied together with code.

Source program is code, forms, menus, graphics, and help files that you create and edit to form the project (also called source code). The parts of the application that you create, such as the forms, the code, and the graphics that you prepare for output, comprise the source program. When you or another user compiles or runs the source program, VB translates the program into an executable program. You cannot make changes directly to an executable program. If you see bugs when you run the program, you must change the source application (which might contain multiple files in the project) and rerun or recompile the source.

The Toolbox Supplies Controls The toolbox contains the controls that you place on the Form window. The toolbox never runs out of controls; if you place a command button on the Form window, another awaits you on the toolbox, ready to be placed also. The Form Layout Window Places Forms The Form Layout window displays the initial position and relative size of the current form shown in the Form window. The Form Layout window always shows where the form appears in the current Form window. If you want the form to appear at a different location from the current position, you can move the form inside the Form Layout window to move the form's appearing position when the user runs the application. The Project Explorer Window The Project Explorer window, often called the Project window, gives you a tree-structured view of all the files in the application. Microsoft changed the formal name from Project window to Project Explorer window between versions 4 and 5 to celebrate the resemblance of the window to the typical Explorer-like tree-structured file views so prevalent in Windows 95 and NT. You can expand and collapse branches of the view to get more or less detail. The Project Explorer window displays forms, modules (files that hold supporting code for the application), classes (advanced modules), and more. When you want to work with a particular part of the loaded application, double-click the component in the Project window to bring that component into focus. In other words, if the Project Explorer window displays three forms and you need to edit one of the forms, locate and double-click the form name in the Project window to activate that form in the Form window.

The Properties Window A different list appears in the Properties window every time you click over a different Form window tool. The Properties window describes properties (descriptive and functional information) about the form and its controls. Many properties exist for almost every object in Visual Basic. The Properties window lists all the properties of the Form window's selected control. Help Is at Your Fingertips Visual Basic's online help system is one of the most advanced on the market. When you want help with a control, window, tool, or command, press F1. Visual Basic analyzes what you are doing and offers help. In addition, Visual Basic supports a tremendous help resource called Books Online. When you select Books Online from the Help menu, Visual Basic displays a tree-structured view of books about Visual Basic that you can search and read. The online help extends to the Internet as well. If you have an Internet connection, you can browse the latest help topics by selecting Help|Microsoft on the Web. Summary Perhaps you already can see that Visual Basic is more than it first appears. Programmers use Visual Basic to create extremely advanced Windows applications.