Now that we have studied the common events in visual basic, let us study the Visual Basic 6 environment in detail. I need more than one article to cover this substantially. So hang on.
The Visual Basic IDE is a collection of menus, toolbars, and windows that make up your programming workbench. Each part of the IDE has features that affect different aspects of your programming activity. The menu bar lets you direct the overall activity and management of your programming. The toolbar enables you to access much of the menu bar's functionality through various toolbar buttons. Forms--the basic building blocks of Visual Basic programs--are presented in a Form window. You use the ToolBox to add controls to the forms of your project. The Project Explorer displays the projects on which you're working, as well as the different parts of each of those projects. You browse and set a control, form, and module's properties within the Properties window. Finally, you position and view a form or forms onscreen within the Form Layout window.
We have already had a brief overview of this aspects in previous articles. So let us see what each toolbar does in detail here.
Edit Toolbar
The features of the Edit toolbar are similar to those of the Edit menu. You can Cut and Paste text. You can manipulate the layout of your code and do text selection, searches, and replacement. Also, you can use automatic coding features such as Quick Info.
An interesting VB IDE feature that the Edit toolbar uses is the Complete Word feature. This feature automatically completes a keyword for you. The Complete Word feature is very useful for avoiding syntax errors due to misspelling. Also this helps you save time when you have to code long event-driven programs. Remember, only the intrinsic VB statements get auto-completed, not all.
Controls & ToolBox
As we have seen earlier, controls are the building blocks with which you assemble your Visual Basic program. The ToolBox is a palette of controls, and you build your user interface by selecting controls from the ToolBox and placing them on your forms.
Some controls are built into Visual Basic and can't be removed from the ToolBox; these controls reside within Visual Basic itself. These controls are known as intrinsic controls. Others live outside Visual Basic and reside in files that end with the extension .ocx. These controls can be added and removed from the ToolBox. Ocx controls provide the much talked-about flexibility to the VB language. User can write his own Ocx controls and provide more functionality. Ocx can be considered as the #include files in the C/C++
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