Visual Basic6

This VB6 tutorial will cover basic Graphical User Interface methods in Visual Basic. This is not a complicated topic, but it is something crucial if you are going to develop a good looking application.

Overview

If you've read some other beginner visual basic tutorials on this site, you're probably saying to yourself, "I thought this was supposed to be Visual Basic!" Indeed, Visual Basic is very much so an interface-oriented language, far moreso than other languages, and designing even complex graphical user interfaces (or GUIs) is quite simple.

In contrast to tradional, command-line interfaces, almost all user interfaces in Visual Basic are constructed using the WIMP, or "windows, icon, menu, pointer," GUI style. This means that Visual Basic programs interact with users almost exclusively using graphical elements, such as windows, buttons, toolbars, etc., with very few console-based applications (in fact, creating a console-based VB application is quite difficult, requiring advanced API techniques, which will be covered much later). While in previous lessons, we've made use of Debug.Print, which is not a WIMP element, it's important to note that the debugging, or intermediate, window is only visible in design mode, and not during typical program execution.

In this tutorial, we'll introduce and expand upon three basic methods of creating WIMP interfaces in Visual Basic: using the MsgBox function (which you've seen before), the InputBox function, and forms and controls.

MsgBox revisited

Up until now, we've blindly used this magical MsgBox function to display text without really understanding what it was, how it worked, or what could be done with it. Now that we have a bit more understanding of functions, subroutines, and control structures, let's take a somewhat closer look at it.

MsgBox is a actually a function, like many of the functions we've used and created before, provided by the standard VB runtime. Its function declaration is the... [continues]

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