C# 4 and .NET 4

Working with Visual studio 2010 ❘ 389
Visual Studio 2010 provides a toolbox with a large number of components
that are available for your development purposes. The categories of
components available through the toolbox depend, to some extent, on the
type of project you are editing — for example, you will get a far wider
range when you are editing the WindowsFormsApplication1 project
in the DemoSolution solution than you will when you are editing the
ConsoleApplication1 project. The most important ranges of items
available include the following:
➤
Data — Classes that allow you to connect to data sources and
manage the data they contain. Here, you will find components
for working with Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and any OleDb
data source.
➤ Windows Forms Controls (labeled as Common Controls) —
Classes that represent visual controls such as text boxes, list boxes,
or tree views for working with thick-client applications.
➤
➤
Web Forms Controls (labeled as Standard) — Classes that basically
do the same thing as Windows controls but work in the context of
web browsers, and that work by sending HTML output to simulate
the controls to the browser. (You will see this only when working
with ASP.NET applications.)
Components — Miscellaneous .NET classes that perform various
useful tasks on your machine, such as connecting to directory
services or to the event log.
You can also add your own custom categories to the toolbox by rightclicking
any category and selecting Add Tab from the context menu.
You can also place other tools in the toolbox by selecting Choose Items
from the same context menu — this is particularly useful for adding your
favorite COM components and ActiveX controls, which are not present
figure 16-17
in the toolbox by default. If you add a COM control, you can still click
to place it in your project just as you would with a .NET control. Visual
Studio automatically adds all the required COM interoperability code to allow your project to call up the
control. In this case, what is actually added to your project is a .NET control that Visual Studio creates
behind the scenes and that acts as a wrapper for your COM control.
To see how the toolbox works, place a text box in your basic form project. You simply click the TextBox
control contained within the toolbox and then click again to place it in the form in the design view (or if
you prefer, you can simply drag and drop the control directly onto the design surface). Now the design view
looks like Figure 16-18, showing roughly what WindowsFormsApplication1 will look like if you compile
and run it.
If you look at the code view of your form, you can see that Visual Studio 2010 does not add the code that
instantiates a TextBox object to go on the form directly as it did in the early versions of the IDE. Instead,
you will need to expand the plus sign next to Form1.cs in the Visual Studio Solution Explorer. Here, you
will find a file that is dedicated to the design of the form and the controls that are placed on the form —
Form1.Designer.cs. In this class file, you will find a new member variable in the Form1 class:
partial class Form1
{
private System.Windows.Forms.TextBox textBox1;
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