Visual Design

Application design starts with building the user interface from a wealth of components. Looking at the list of built-in components it's almost hard to imagine you'd need anything more. Every standard Windows element has a corresponding component—buttons, text boxes, scroll bars, menus, and so on. The more advanced elements—such as tree views, list views, and toolbars—are also represented. You also get system components like the timer and media player. All the standard Windows common dialogs can be invoked using simple components. There's Database components, Internet components, even components for creating Web services and controlling Microsoft Office applications; just about anything you can imagine is here. There's even a new component to give your program a system tray icon, complete with optional animation and balloon tips—finally!

Designing a user interface starts with dragging components onto a form. Next, you use the Object Inspector to adjust the component properties such as the caption for a button or the default text for an edit box. Properties also control behaviors like how the component changes when the form resizes and whether a tooltip will appear when the mouse is over it. Once you've added a few components and set their properties, you already have a program—run it now, for instant gratification!

The next step is to define what happens when the user, say, clicks a button or types text in an edit box. These event handlers appear in the Object Inspector too. Double-click one and Turbo Explorer automatically creates an empty method for you—just add code! To show how easy it is, I built a mini-browser. I added an edit box, a status bar, and a Web browser component and tweaked a few properties. I wrote a single line of code so that pressing Enter in the edit box makes the web browser navigate to whatever URL is in the box. That's it—instant browser. A few more lines of code allowed it to show its progress and display the current page's title.—next: Writing Code >