Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition: Build a Program Now! (11 page)

Your screen should now look like the

one in Figure 3-13.

Figure 3-13

Customize window with Start Without

Debugging selected

Now you must add the command to the main toolbar. To do that, drag Start Without Debugging from the Commands area and drop it onto the main toolbar to the right of the

Both figures have the “before”

Start Debugging button. (Figure 3-14 shows a before and after view of this process.) When
on the left and the “after” on the

finished, click Close in the Customize dialog box.

right, overlapping the before.

Figure 3-14

Before and after customizing the tool-

bar with the Start Without Debugging

command.

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To make sure the customization worked, click

the new icon on the Debug menu or the toolbar.

(Or, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F5.) You

should see a command prompt window with the

expected output, which is the string: “The sum of

10 and 5 is 15.” You should also see the message

“Press any key to continue . . .” as shown in

Figure 3-15.

As you probably realized by now, the effect

of the new command is to add the “Press any

key to continue…” and pause the execution after

the last instruction is executed. Press any key to

close the command prompt window and return

Figure 3-15

to the IDE. When you’re done, you can close the project by going to File/Close Solution.
Command prompt window with the

expected result and a message indi-

You'll be prompted to save or discard your changes. Click Save, and then if the name and
cating a paused execution

location are fine, click Save again in the Save Project dialog box.

Creating a Windows Application

You've just built a console application. The next

step is to develop the same application as a

Windows application.

TO BUILD A WINDOWS APPLICATION

When creating the console application, you saw

1 the New Project dialog box. Open it again by

going to the File menu and selecting
New Project . . .

This time, select
Windows Application
from the

Templates section and type in
MyFirstWindowsApplic

ation
. Make sure your screen looks like the one in

Figure 3-16 and then click
OK
.

Figure 3-16

Creating a Windows application using

the New Project dialog box

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You’ll immediately see that the result of this operation is quite different for the Windows application process than it was for the console application process. You should see the Windows Form Designer as displayed in Figure 3-17.

Figure 3-17

IDE with the Windows Form Designer

and an empty form

On the left side of the IDE, move your mouse over the Toolbox tab to open the Toolbox window. Click 2 the plus (+) sign next to the Common Controls. You’ll see a

list of form controls that are often seen in a Windows application.

Select the Button control and drag it onto the Designer surface.

You should get a form that looks like the one in Figure 3-18.

Figure 3-18

Windows Form Designer surface

with a Button control

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Maybe you don’t realize it but at this moment you already have a full and valid Windows application without having written a single line of code. The application doesn’t do anything very useful at this point, but it works! You can easily verify this by running the application. Just hit
F5
and see for yourself. This is part of the “magic” and the beauty of using the Visual Studio® IDE environment for programming instead of using a text editor like Notepad. Visual Studio writes a lot of code for you, and in Chapter 5, we’ll take a look at

Figure 3-19

some of the activity that’s taking place behind the scenes to make it appear like “magic.” When finished,
Button-click method with the code

click the Close button on the form to

from our previous example

return to the IDE.

Double-click the button on the

3 designer surface. You’ll get the

familiar source code window but with

different content this time. For now,

type or copy the code under the Static

void Main(string [ ] args) from the console application you created previously in the Button1_Click method as shown

in Figure 3-19. (You’ll learn more about

this method and the whole process

behind the double-click in Chapter 4.)

In the source code, find the words

4 Console.WriteLine and replace them with the words
MessageBox.Show
. Then build and execute the application by hitting
F5
.

When the form comes up, click the button and you’ll see the result of your 5 application: a message box with the same string you’ve seen in the console application. It should look like Figure 3-20. Click
OK
in the message box and then quit the program by clicking the
Close
button on the main form.

Figure 3-20

Output of MyFirstWindowsApplication

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