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    LESSON 1 - Getting Started: Friday, September 24, 2010friday, September 24, 2010

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    Jesuneshan Thanushan
    The document provides an introduction and overview of creating a basic scoreboard application in Visual Basic (VB) to track touchdowns between the Giants and Redskins football teams. It defines key terms like applications, objects, and event-driven programming in VB. It includes steps to set up a new project, add labels and buttons as controls to a form, customize properties like colors and fonts, and provides an example of basic code for form load and button click events.

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    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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    LESSON 1 - Getting Started: Friday, September 24, 2010friday, September 24, 2010

    Uploaded by

    Jesuneshan Thanushan
    36 views11 pages
    The document provides an introduction and overview of creating a basic scoreboard application in Visual Basic (VB) to track touchdowns between the Giants and Redskins football teams. It defines key terms like applications, objects, and event-driven programming in VB. It includes steps to set up a new project, add labels and buttons as controls to a form, customize properties like colors and fonts, and provides an example of basic code for form load and button click events.

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    The document provides an introduction and overview of creating a basic scoreboard application in Visual Basic (VB) to track touchdowns between the Giants and Redskins football teams. It defines key terms like applications, objects, and event-driven programming in VB. It includes steps to set up a new project, add labels and buttons as controls to a form, customize properties like colors and fonts, and provides an example of basic code for form load and button click events.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    36 views11 pages

    LESSON 1 - Getting Started: Friday, September 24, 2010friday, September 24, 2010

    Uploaded by

    Jesuneshan Thanushan
    The document provides an introduction and overview of creating a basic scoreboard application in Visual Basic (VB) to track touchdowns between the Giants and Redskins football teams. It defines key terms like applications, objects, and event-driven programming in VB. It includes steps to set up a new project, add labels and buttons as controls to a form, customize properties like colors and fonts, and provides an example of basic code for form load and button click events.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 11

    Previous Contents Next

    LESSON 1 - Getting started


    Friday, September 24, 2010Friday, September 24, 2010

    Defining basic terms

    Application
    An application is a collection of objects that work together to accomplish
    something useful. In VB the application is called a Project. A Project could
    be a the management of a Video store, the calculation of mortgages, a
    dating service or the Payroll for 1000 employees ...

    Object
    An object is a piece of software that has properties and functions that can be
    manipulated. Whew! You're here so, you must be somewhat familiar with the
    Windows environment. A window is an object. It has properties: size,
    color, position on the screen, etc. (The purists among you may want to talk
    about a class rather than an object but, at this point we just want to keep it
    simple, and the underlying concept is the same). The window has functions,
    also called methods, that can be manipulated: change the size, move it
    around, open it and close it. You do not have to write code to resize a
    window - you just click and drag. But somebody had to write code at some
    point. Fortunately for us, when they did they put it all in a nice little package
    and called it a window object. Now, whenever you need a window in your
    Project you can make a copy of the window object, change its properties for
    color or size very easily, and paste it where you want it. Then you can use its
    built-in methods to open it, close it when you want or resize it whenever
    necessary. When you create an application using objects and combining
    them to produce results, you are working in an object-oriented
    environment.
    Event-driven
    To produce an application in COBOL, a procedural language, you write
    COBOL source programs, you compile them into machine code and then you
    run them via a control interface such as JCL. A program can contain 1000's
    of lines of source code and could run for hours with no human intervention.
    In fact, in large installations, a jobstream can consist of a dozen programs,
    all automatically accepting input from the previous program and producing
    output for the next. The programmer can be blissfully unaware that the
    program has run unless something catastrophic happens.

    In a VB project, the processes that occur have to be associated with events.


    An event is something that happens - the user clicks on a button, a form is
    opened, the result of a calculation is too large. The operation is event-
    driven because everything that executes does so as the result of some kind
    of event. The role of the programmer is to anticipate the events and to write
    the code that will be executed when the event occurs. A VB application is
    interactive in the sense that the user is constantly interacting with the
    program. The user inputs a Customer Id, the program checks the Id in the
    database and immediately brings up the customer's file or displays a
    message that the particular Id is invalid.

    Top

    Jumping right in!

    Project description
    We want to create a Scoreboard for a football game (there it is already!)
    between the Giants and the Redskins. To begin with the simplest task we will
    only count the touchdowns and display appropriate messages.

    Please note: although we will create a complete functional Project with


    controls and code and so on, the purpose of this exercise is to show what
    can be done. In the following lessons we will be explaining scripts and the
    use of controls in a lot more detail. If you study this example you should be
    able to relate it to what you already know of programming and judge
    whether this tutorial will be easy or hard for you to do.

    Creating the Project


    First thing to do is to create a Directory where you will store all your VB
    Projects. Call it VBApps, for example. Then start VB. The first screen will ask
    whether you want to open a new project or an existing one - it's obviously a
    new one and it will be a Standard EXE. Then, maximize all the windows (it's
    easier to work with - some of the examples in the tutorial had to be reduced
    for the sake of the presentation). Now, save your project. It will first ask you
    to save the form - call it Score.frm - and then the Project - call it
    Scorebrd.vbp. From now on, do File-->Save Project very, very frequently.
    Before you start to build-up the form, it will make it easier if you change the
    color of the form. Otherwise you will be working with grey controls on a grey
    background. To change the color, just click anywhere on the form, go to the
    properties window, find the property called BackColor and change it to the
    standard Window background (teal) or to any color you want in the palette.

    In our first example we will need 6 labels and 2 command buttons. Each
    one of these objects that you put on a Form is called a control. To get a
    control you go to the Toolbox, click on the control you want, come back to
    the Form and click and drag the control to the size and position you want.
    Position the controls somewhat like in the diagram below.
    IMPORTANT NOTE: If this is your first experience with VB, don't be afraid to
    experiment. This is hands-on stuff! Remember that VB is a Microsoft product,
    therefore it works with the standard Windows interface. All the functions you know
    from MS-Office work the same way here: Copy, Cut, Paste, (Ctrl)+(Click), (Shift)+
    (Click), drag the mouse over a group of controls to select them all, etc. The Undo
    button is a nice one to keep handy - when you modify a control you can always Undo
    the change - remember this when you get to the part about aligning the controls,
    making them all the same size and so on. That part can get tricky. If you accidentally
    end up in the Code window while palying around, go down a few paragraphs and you
    will see how to get back to the Form. At this point the worst that can happen is that
    your Form will get all messed up. So what! You can just scrap it and start over
    again, but you will have learned something.

    Now that we have a bunch of controls on the form, we have to jazz them up
    a bit. We do this by changing the Properties of the controls in the
    Properties window. Each control has a whole series of properties, most of
    which we won't need right now. The ones we do need are:
    Alignment = how text aligns in the control
    BackColor = choose the color of the background
    Caption = the text that will appear in the control
    Font = choose the font type and size
    ForeColor = choose the color of the text (foreground)
    As with all Windows applications, you can select multiple controls with (Ctrl)
    +(Click) and change a property for all of them at once. For example, if all
    backgrounds are white, select all controls, change ForeColor to white and all
    of them are modified. Change your form to look like the one below. Note that
    you do not have to change the Caption for Label4, Label5 and Label6 and
    that you can't change the color of the buttons. They insist on being what was
    called in the old days "IBM grey". Don't forget to save your project often
    as you go along!
    If you Run the application at this point, you should see your Form appear,
    just the way you created it. However if you click on any of the controls,
    absolutely nothing happens! There are events that occur; the form
    opens, a button is clicked, etc. But, there is nothing that tells the form what
    to do when it sees an event. That is why we have to write code, also called
    script.

    Top
    To switch between the Code window and the Form window, use the buttons
    just over the Project Explorer window (diagram on the left).
    Once in the Code window, you have the option of seeing all the code for the
    Project or the code for one event at a time. Use the buttons in the lower left-
    hand corner (diagram on the right).
    To select the object and the event you wish to code, use the two Listboxes at
    the top of the Code window. The one on the left for the object and the one
    on the right for the event. Start with General ... Declarations and then
    Form ... Load, etc.

    At this point you might want to download the sample program and study
    it. In the following lessons we'll add functionality to the exercice and we'll
    explain what the code means. But for the moment, a good exercice would be
    to write part of the code and then try to figure out how to improve certain
    aspects of the program.

    You can download the application here: FootScoreboard.zip


    Now we can Run it and see something happen. When the Form loads, it will
    initialize the fields that we specified in the code.

    Now code the Command1 button and Run it to see the result.

    For additional resources you might find this site useful: Free Visual Basic 6
    tutorials, samples and source code examples.

    If you haven't found the Visual Basic resource you're


    looking for,
    use our Google Search box for more information.
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