Programming in VB6

4. Select a Label from the Toolbox on the left hand side of the screen and draw it out in the top left corner of the form.  Find its Name property and change this to 'lblPrompt'.  Find the Caption property and change the text in it to ‘Type your name:’

                Toolbox        Run Program

                        FORM                Solution Explorer

                                                Properties

5. Add from the Toolbox a TextBox on the right of lblPrompt.  Rename it 'txtInput'.  Delete the text in the Text property.

6. Add from the Toolbox a CommandButton in the middle of the form. Rename it cmdProcess.  Change the text in the Caption property to ‘Click Me’.

7. Finally put another Label at the bottom of the form.  Rename this one lblOutput.  Delete the text in the Caption property.
8. Now for the code. Above the properties box you will see the Solution Explorer.

        Form Icon

Code Icon

                        Solution Explorer

9. Click the Code Icon and you will be taken to the Code window.  Clicking the Form Icon will take you back to the Form Design window.  In the Code window, you should see the line Option Explicit.  If not, tell your teacher!

10. Go back to the Form and double click the CommandButton, cmdProcess. You will be taken back to the code sheet on which is some automatically generated code – Private Sub cmdProcess_Click() and below it End Sub.  These are the first and last lines of an Event Procedure which will run when the button is clicked.  Any code you type between these lines will run as well.

11. Under Private Sub cmdProcess_Click() type  Dim strName as String.  This is a variable declaration.  The variable is called strName and Dim is short for 'Dimension' which roughly means 'make room for' or 'assign some memory for'.   The type of variable (or data type) is String, which can contain characters (typically text made up of letters or digits if they are not required to be numbers).

12. After Dim strName as String  add the line  strName = txtInput.Text.  

This is an assignment and means 'let the variable strName take the value of whatever the user has typed into TextBox, txtInput.

13. Under this type:

lblOutput.Caption = "Hello" & strName & " and welcome to Visual Basic!"

this means when the button is clicked, lblOutput will show the text "Hello (whatever you typed in the textbox) and welcome to Visual Basic!".

14. Run the program and click the button.  Well done, program complete!