Subtitles of the Movie

Continuing our discussion about multiple forms oftentimes you might want to include an About Box or an About Form, which is simply an informational form that the user can refer to, to get Copyright Information or basic information that the author of the program would like to include. You can create your own About Box by creating a new form and then simply entering information to labels. But you can also use one of the About Boxes templates which has been predefined and will add another level of professionalism to your projects. Although you can associate an About Box with a button just as easily as a menu typically you see these with menus. So I might add a simply menu onto the form and I will add File, Edit and About. Now if you need more instruction on how to create Menu you should refer to the movies that are that focus specifically on creating Menus. Now I have an About Item on my form, I can then add the template for the About Form, just like I have for other forms, I click on Project, Add Windows Form and then I found the About Box Template. The default name is About Box 1, I could leave that or I could just call it About Box which I'll do in this case. I'll click Add and as you can now see the About Box has been added to the Solution Explorer and you see the template for the About Box. Once again you see the graphic that's been included, that can be changed obviously. Where you see product name, versions, copyrights and company names, these are nothing more then labels and these labels can be altered to fit your specific application. The description area, you can see again is nothing more then label and you can change the Text Property of that label. For example if I change the description of this placeholder I'll simply write this is the information provided by the programmer and that will take the place of that default description and again you could replace the product name, version, copyright and company name, but for the sake of time I will leave that as they are. Just recognize they can all be changed by going to the Text Property of each of those respective labels. Notice also there is an OK Button, the OK Button by default is there and if we take a look at the code for the OK Button it simple is me.close. So this means that when the user is finished looking at the About Box and they click the OK Button then this form, the About Box will then close. Now I'll run the program but there is one thing we have not done yet, so I'll go ahead and run this so you can see the necessity of one more step. I'll run a Project which includes a splash screen, then goes to our main form. So now if I'm on main form I can click on the About but as you notice nothing happens, that's because the About Box is in the project but is not being linked to in any way. So I need to go back to my form, to my main form that is where my About Menu is and I'll double click on that at Design Time opening up the code window for the About Item and I simply need to name the name of the form which is About Box .show. This will then allow the user to see the About Box, in other words it's the Show Method calling that form. So now if I run the project, allow the splash screen to show and then the main form and now if I click the About this is my About Box and by clicking the OK Button the form will close and return to the main form. Click in the About Form one more time, you'll notice that I am able to bounce back and forth between the forms, that are because the method I chose to show the form was the modeless form as opposed to the module form. If I had said Show Dialog then the About Form would have to be responded to in some way. So if I alter that line of code now saying About Box.Show Dialog and run the project one last time, splash, screen, main form, now when I click on the form I cannot bounce back to the main form. I have to either click the Close Button or click the OK button to allow the project to continue. So as you can see adding About Forms and Splash Screens are very easy and they do add a certain level of professionalism to your project. One last note about the Project Properties is that you can very easily set these various assembly names so that you can alter the information without having to actually change the Text Properties. By clicking the Assembly Information you can enter your information here such as the title of your project, the product name, copyright information and then your assembly and file versions and any other information that you want to be in consistently through out all your projects. So if you're doing lots of projects and you don't want to have to reenter all this information each time, simply go to the Assembly Information Button which is found under the Project Properties Item and this will save lots of time when you're doing multiple projects, you want that same information carried over from one project to the next. It also adds a new level of consistency so as things do change your projects automatically update themselves.