Tool Tips

All Windows users know what tool tips are—they're those small windows that appear with explanatory text when you let the mouse rest on a control or window. That's what tool tips are used for—to give quick help when the mouse rests on an item. You can see a tool tip at work in the ToolTips example from the CD-ROM in Figure 8.6, explaining the rather obvious fact that the mouse is resting on a button.

Figure 8.6: A tool tip at work.

In VB6 and before, controls themselves had a ToolTip property, but now tool tips are separate components. You can associate a tool tip with any other control. To connect a tool tip with a control, you use its SetToolTip method. For example, to connect the tool tip you see in Figure 8.6 to Button1, you can use this code:

ToolTip1.SetToolTip(Button1, "This is a button")

You also can use the GetToolTip method to get information about a tool tip object.

The important properties for tool tip controls are Active, which must be set to True for the tool tip to appear, and AutomaticDelay, which sets the length of time that the tool tip is shown, how long the user must point at the control for the tool tip to appear, and how long it takes for subsequent tool tip windows to appear.