Creating Your Own Web Browser in Less Than Five Minutes with Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition

  • 3/5/2008
Contents

Putting It All Together

You’ve just seen that when you drag a control to the design surface, you’re actually creating an object of that control class. When you’re naming the control in the Properties window, you’re actually assigning a name to the variable you’ve just created—which is exactly what you did for the three controls used in your browser. In fact, this is why you want to give your controls meaningful names so that you can use them later programmatically.

MORE INFO

Philosophies differ when it comes to naming the variable that represents controls on the design surface. In this book, I’ll use up to three letters to describe and identify the control type by looking at its name, such as btn for a button control. The variable name then becomes btnGo. I will introduce the list when I talk about common controls in Chapter 5, "Using Rapid Application Development Tools with Visual C# 2008".

As you now know, a great deal of activity was taking place when you dropped controls on the designer surface. To help you understand what took place in the background, we talked about important OOP concepts behind the line of code you added to respond to the Click event.

Now that you’ve run the application, here is a list of questions you may have:

  • What happens if I put nothing in the text box and hit Enter?

  • What happens if I enter an invalid URL?

  • What happens if I enter anything I want?

IMPORTANT

Before moving on, I invite you to look at a video on the MSDN Web site that talks about object-oriented programming. You’ve read a good introduction to OOP both in this chapter and in Chapter 1. To understand the concept from another angle, navigate to http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308750.aspx and view Lesson 6.

My answer to you is simply, “Try it. Try it now.” The real deal is that your Web browser will actually behave like any other Web browser and will navigate to whatever URL is typed into the text box. If you don’t type anything, clicking the GO button will have no effect. If you type something that isn’t a URL, the browser control will come back with a Page Not Found or Code 404 page.

Now is your time to experiment. Remember this book’s rule: try, try, try. Play with it. Change some of the properties, and see the results at run time. Although we haven’t used many features yet, you’ll add more in Chapter 6. This project is far from over! By adding new features, you’ll arrive at a point where your application will start to look much more familiar.

Links To More Information

Other good sources of information are the videos from MSDN that were created to cover Visual C# 2005 Express Edition but are still applicable. The videos for Lessons 2 and 7 cover some of the topics you have just learned and will provide you with another point of view. You can find the videos for Lessons 2 and 7 by visiting the following hyperlinks:

For Lesson 2: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308738.aspx

For Lesson 7: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308753.aspx

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This chapter is from the book