Graphical User Interface Designing

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START GUI DEVELOPMENT WITH C#.NET

It’s obvious that no one likes to work with Command line applications. Even though your application may be performance wise superior, users will choose the application with the better Graphical User Interface.

So, is it hard developing GUI application?

No it’s damn easy to develop a GUI app.

There were days when creating GUI applications with Win32 API (Application programing interface) was a headache. But now with the help of Visual Studio one can make simple-basic applications just by some drag and drop features and few lines (literally 10-15 line) of code.

First of all you will require Visual Studio C# 2010/Visual studio windows desktop 2013. You can download it from the following URL.

http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs

All the express editions are for free.

Visual Studio is one of the IDE (Integrated Development Environment) used for the development of GUI application. An IDE is software that aids a programmer in developing complex application. Most of the time the IDE will provide the skeleton code for different part of the application and your job reduces to only filling the code at the required places.

While working with VS (Visual studio)  you may use C# or Visual Basic. But I strongly recommend C#. C# has a remarkable resemblance with JAVA. Even if you don’t know JAVA, learning C# is not rocket science.

The development in VS takes place in two views:

1>     Code View: This is where we write the actual code for the actions that have to be executed on different events (like clicking, mouse hover, etc.).

2>     Design View: This is where we design how the application looks. We can include GUI elements by just selecting them from the Tool Box. In this way we generate GUI elements and edit their properties without manually writing code for them in the code view.

NOTE: If you want you can manually write code for GUI elements in the code view.

For example if you want to create a button, you’ll first go to design view select button from the tool box and place it on the screen. And you can change the properties like name, size, colour, text and other visual attributes of the button.

If you want something to be done when a button is clicked, all you have to do is double click the button in the design view and IDE will take you to the place where coding for the button has to be done. All the empty function will be generated automatically and you just have to fill in the code.

This is the general flow in which the development of various parts of an application takes place. It is not possible to explain the actual process in a single post.The following source contains very good compilation of all the basic information if you want to learn C#.NET for GUI applications. It contains the information on commonly used classes and how to use them in your code. The tutorial is meant for beginners and contains step by step instructions.

http://www.homeandlearn.co.uk/csharp/csharp.html

 

Learning to develop GUI application is easy and straight forward but not a one day task. I would recommend you to be regular and understand by implementing the topics in the above mention link.

Happy coding!

 

Manav Prajapati

3rd Year Comps

SVNIT

Email: manav245@gmail.com

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