What basics should be remembered while developing win form apps?

• Make your form layout simple and easy to understand. It is important that the user of your application finds it familiar. The behavior should be expected and should not surprise the user.
• The Format menu of the Visual Studio.NET IDE is very useful when designing the form layout. It provides a number of useful options for alignment and size of the controls.
• Almost all the controls have some similar properties like Location, Size, Enabled, Visible, TabIndex, etc. The TabIndex property is very important. It describes the sequence followed by the windows focus when the user presses the Tab button of keyboard.
• Usually we don't change the Name property of labels as we don’t need to use the label variable in our code most of the time.
• The controls should be named so that their purpose can be recognized, e.g., you may name the ‘Purchase’ button as btnPurchase, text box for entering email may be txtEmail and so on.
• Although now it is not a standard convention, but it is useful to add a three letter prefix to the name of your controls so that they are recognizable with their name. Most of the developers used to follow the convention like prefixing Label with lbl (lblGreeting), TextBox with txt (txtComments), Button with btn (btnPurchase), CheckBox with cbx (cbxProgCS), RadioButton with rbn (rbnFullPayment) and GroupBox with gbx (gbxPaymentMode).

Advertisement

Free Magazine

eWeek The essential technology information source for builders of e-business.... subscribe now