Visual BASIC (810:151) Week #1

  1. PME - Properties, Methods and Events. All Objects in Visual Basic have properties (such as FontSize, BackColor, ForeColor, Caption, for today's Command Button object and Form object examples).

    Most objects respond to Events (such as Click events, MouseMove events for the escaping unclickable command button today, Timer events for the Timer object, etc.).

    Objects know how to DO things, such as Cls (a Form or a PictureBox knows how to Clear itself (CLS for Clear Screen)), a Form knows how to Print on itself, or set the color of a PIXEL with PSet method. Print, PSet, Cls - these are all methods. The M in PME acronym.

  2. Random Numbers were introduced on Monday, day #1 including the Rnd() function but not yet introducing the need for using the Randomize statement.

  3. The Timer control was first discussed in lecture 1 on January 13th with its Interval property and its Enabled property. You will hear more about Timer controls throughout the Visual Basic class, until they are 2nd nature. Animations and simple games of skill are easily created in VB, and the Timer control is part of that process.

  4. The RGB function was also introduced on day #1.

    RGB( red, green, blue) for up to 16 million+ different colors.

  5. Popupmenu Method and menus in Visual Basic will be covered by the END of week #1.

  6. POINT method was mentioned as the way to pick up the color of a pixel. The PSET method will be how we can set the color of a pixel. How many bytes are used to store a color in Visual Basic? Why this many bytes? How does this relate to the RGB function?

The MSDN ONLINE HELP and Visual Basic documentation start page. THIS WILL BE DEMONSTRATED IN CLASS ON TUESDAY, January 14th.

The DragMode property and the DragIcon property will be covered sometime during week #1 or week #2. Glance them over ahead of time.

Summer 2000 Lecture 5 (summer of 2000) Timer example program at Design Time and at Run Time, after quite a few FontSize + 2 operations and Timer1_Timer events have occurred.

  • Handout and PowerPoint slides for Lecture #1, June 5th, 2000. This example program will be discussed for at least one more lecture, on Tuesday, June 6th. It is a supplement to chapter two.