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Creating a Password Control

It's time to heighten security—users of your new SuperSpecialDataBase program are worried about the low security of your program, so you can add a little security with password controls. Visual Basic can help.

To convert a standard text box into a password box, you just assign some character (usually an asterisk, "*") to the text box's PasswordChar property. After that, your program can read the text in the text box, but only the password character will appear on the screen each time the user types a character, as shown in Figure 5.6.

Tip

You may be concerned that someone can copy the text in a password control and paste it into a word processor to read it, but in fact, clipboard handling from the text box is disabled if you are using a password character.