Creating Windows Applications

We've already created Windows applications in Chapter 1. Doing so is easy—you just open the New Project dialog with the New Project button in the Start page, or the New|Project menu item in the File menu. Then you select the Visual Basic Projects folder in the Project Types box at right in this dialog, select the Windows Application icon in the Templates box, give a new Name (I'll call this project WinHello) and Location to the application in the boxes of the same names, and click OK. This creates a Windows project and solution as you see in Figure 4.1; these are the files created, and what they mean:

WindowsApp.vbproj—A Visual Basic project.
AssemblyInfo.vb—General Information about an assembly, including version information.
Form1.vb—A form's code file.
Form1.resx.NET—An XML-based resource template.
WindowsApp.vbproj.user—Stores project user options.
WindowsApp.sln—The solution file, storing the solution's configuration.
WindowsApp.suo—Stores solution user options.
bin—Directory for binary executables.
obj—Directory for debugging binaries.

All these files are created for us automatically by Visual Basic. As you can see in Figure 4.1, however, there's not much happening in this program yet. It's time to add some controls.