Mastering Visual Basic .NET

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Chapter 2 VISUAL BASIC PROJECTS
Registry Editor Button
Click this button to add new keys to the user’s Registry. You don’t have to add anything to the user’s
Registry, especially for this project. But you can place special strings in the Registry, like an encoded
date to find out when a demo version of your application may expire. You must first familiarize
yourself with the Registry and how to program it with Visual Basic, before you attempt to use it
with your applications.
File Types Editor Button
If your application uses its own file type, you can associate that type with your application, so that
when the user double-clicks a file of this type your application starts automatically. This is a sure way
to ruin the user’s file associations. If your application can handle GIF images or HTML files, don’t
even think of taking over these files. Use this option only with files that are unique to your application.
To add a new file type on the user’s machine, click the File Types Editor button on the Properties
window. On the Designer’s surface, you will see a single item: File Types On Target Machine.
Right-click the item and select Add File Type. This command will add a new file type and the verb
&Open under it. Click the new file type and you will see its properties in the Properties window.
You can assign a description to the new file type, its extension, and the command that will be used
to open the files of this type (the name of your application’s EXE file).
User Interface Editor Button
Click this button and you will see the steps of the installation on the Designer’s surface, as shown in
Figure 2.20. Each phase of the installation process has one or more steps, and a different dialog box
is displayed at each step. Some of the dialog boxes contain messages, like a short description of the
application or a copyright message. These strings are exposed as properties of the corresponding dialog
box, and you can change them. Just click a dialog box in the User Interface Editor and then look
up its properties in the Properties window.
Figure 2.20
The outline of the
installation process
The wizard inserts all the necessary dialog boxes, but you can add custom dialog boxes. If you do,
you must also provide some code to process the user’s selections on the custom dialog box. For our
simple example, we don’t need any customized dialog boxes. I will repeat here that the topic of creating
a customized Windows installer is one of the major aspects of Visual Studio.NET, and when