Working With Controls

A control is an object on the interface, such as a button or scroll bar, that a user manipulates in order to interact with an application. Some controls display information, while others receive information from a user. Each control has properties, methods, and events that are relevant to the control’s purpose. For example, because the Text Box control is intended for text entry, it includes the Font property, which determines the font the control uses to display text.

The Windows CE Toolkit for Visual Basic 6.0 contains both ActiveX and intrinsic controls. Intrinsic controls are controls that have been built into the Visual Basic run-time environment. Your application automatically includes the necessary functionality to display and run intrinsic controls. ActiveX controls are Component Object Model (COM) objects that exist independently of your application. For this reason, you need to add ActiveX controls to your application before you can use them.

All controls are visible during design time, but not all controls are visible during run time. A control is visible at run time if it has a Visible property with a value of True. Conversely, a control is invisible at run time if it has a Visible property with a value of False. A control without a Visible property is always invisible during run time.