Chapter 3 Working with Toolbox Controls 81
- Click the Start Debugging button on the Standard toolbar.
Visual Basic runs the program in the IDE. The calculator image appears in a picture box
on the form, and the first check box contains a check mark.- Select the Copy Machine check box.
Visual Basic displays the copy machine image, as shown here:- Experiment with different combinations of check boxes, selecting or clearing the boxes
several times to test the program. The program logic you added with a few short
lines of Visual Basic code manages the boxes perfectly. (You’ll learn much more about
program code in upcoming chapters .) - Click the Close button on the form to end the program.
Using Group Boxes and Radio Buttons
The RadioButton control is another tool that you can use to receive input in a program,
and it is also located on the Common Controls tab of the Toolbox. Radio buttons get their
name from the old push-button car radios of the 1950s and 1960s, when people pushed
or “selected” one button on the car radio and the rest of the buttons clunked back to the
unselected position. Only one button could be selected at a time, because (it was thought)
the driver should listen to only one thing at a time. In Visual Studio, you can also offer
mutually exclusive options for a user on a form, allowing them to pick one (and only one)
option from a group. The procedure is to use the GroupBox control to create a frame on the
form, and then to use the RadioButton control to place the desired number of radio buttons
in the frame. (Because the GroupBox control is not used that often, it is located on the
Containers tab of the Toolbox .) Note also that your form can have more than one group of