User Input

As we have now written some text asking the user (the person using the program) for his or her name, we need to give them somewhere to type it. To do this we use the TextBox control. This is the icon in the Toolbox. Just like before, select this icon, and add the textbox to your form, next to the 'Please enter your name' text. Again, we can use the Properties window to change a few things. First, rename the textbox to txtName (as txt is the conventional prefix for textboxes). The other thing we need to change is its Text property; because the user needs to enter some text, the textbox needs to start out empty, rather than having 'Text1' displayed in it. To do this, scroll down to the Text property in the Property Window, and delete the text.

By now, your form should look something like this:

For the next stage you need to add one more control; the CommandButton control. This simply a button that the user can click, in this case to say that he/she has entered their name. To add the control, click the icon, and add the control to your form, next to the text box. Name this control cmdOK, and set its Caption property to 'OK'.

You will notice that to change the text on a control, sometimes the property is called Caption, and sometimes it is called Text. The reason for this is that in a Text box, a user can change what appears in it (and therefore it is Text). On a button or label control however, the text is static. This means that it cannot be changed by the user.