[icyfyer]

I am trying to design a Windows Form Application in VisualStudio which has text input boxes so that users can input data and have the application perform actions to that dtat, then display the results. So far I have done the obvious part of designing the application in the designer, but I am stuck, because I don't know how to retrieve the data from the text boxes to perform actions. I have been searching Google for a long time, and the closest thing I can find is the "get" ...command(?)... for retrieving information and displaying it in a pop-up dialog box. I found it here:

http://msdn.microsof...4(v=VS.71).aspx

Here's what I am trying to do, specifically: The application has multiple text boxes for inputting measurements of circles, either the circumference, radius, diameter, etc. It also has a GO button and a results box. The user enters what information they have - the circumference for example - and hits the GO button. The application takes that, applies math to it, and returns all the other data (radius, diameter, inches and cm to 90* etc).

I can find tutorials on how to make the GO button work, pretty easily, but without the ability to get the user's data, it's useless. I also can't can't find any tutorials on how to make the data print to a results box, rather than a separate dialog pop-up box.

Ideas?

So after I posted this RFI, I get a list of related posts below, and one of them is a tutorial for a calculator program. I am going to check this out, and hopefully I can glean enough information to apply it to a Windows Form Application.

I would still appreciate information from the masses.

[tlhIn`toq]

icyfyer, on 01 January 2012 - 09:47 AM, said:

I am stuck, because I don't know how to retrieve the data from the text boxes

You have to access .Text property for each textbox.

It sounds like you simply installed Visual Studio then started mucking about with it. That's just not going to get you anywhere. You really need to pick up a book or do some on-line tutorials.

Let me say this though... It sounds like this is all VERY new to you. This type of thing is covered very early on in any self-teaching book. Which makes me think you really aren't ready to be designing an application yet.

Newbie/Rookie said:

I have a little programming experience but I need to write ...

You need to start there. I can't say "I have little experience in speaking Russian, but I have been assigned to write a mystery novel in Russian. Can you help me?"

We can help you by saying "First learn basic programming and the language of C#. Then take on assignments." Could someone here write this program for you? Sure. Could someone here map out all the processes you need to follow and do the Software Design part of this in the slim hope you could code it from there? Sure. But we don't volunteer to do the job that you're either getting paid for, or getting a grade for. You may want to read this.

For now, just work on the lessons. Do a self-teaching book from cover to cover. Then consider writing a program.

Don't try to create a useful working program to fit a need of yours (or a for-pay contract) as your introduction to coding project. When you are learning to code you don't know enough to code a program, let alone know how to engineer the architecture of a program. It would be like saying "I don't know how to read sheet music, or play an instrument. I think I'll write a 3 act opera as my first learning experience."

I don't say this to be mean. We've seen lots of new coders take this approach and we know it doesn't work. Trying to design your own programs before you understand the basics of the code language you've chosen just leads to problems, frustrations, and 'swiss-cheese' education (lots of holes).

---

Resources, references and suggestions for new programmers. - Updated Dec 2011

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Spoiler

Quote

I already have a background in programming from this other software/technology/lanugage so I don't think I need to do tutorials

Here's how I look at doing tutorials even if one has a coding background that makes one think they don't need to do tutorials:

• If one's background really is enough to not need the tutorials, then they won't take long - So what's the harm?
  
• If the tutorials do take a while, then it might be time to re-think how much of one's old experience really applies to the new technology.
  
• There's no down-side. Every tutorial/series teaches something in a new way. Maybe you pick up a neat trick or a different approach to something that you already knew.

The stages of asking for homework help on a forum

Finding answers to specific problems:
Sometimes just knowing where to look can make all the difference. Google is your friend.
Search with either "C#" or "MSDN" as the first word: "MSDN Picturebox", "C# Custom Events", "MSDN timer" etc.
How to do a good search that will get you targeted answers.

Once you have that MSDN page that describes the function, you may not be familiar with out to actually get useful information from that page. There is a LOT of data there. So what is the important parts? Read this guide to reading the MSDN.

Don't think you are the first person to ask a question. Try a search on this site to see if someone has already brought up this problem. Also, as soon as you post your question go to the bottom of the updated page: You will see where the system has already analyzed your question and tried to find similar threads for the same question, so check those links out.

But honestly, just typing away and seeing what pops up in Intellisense is going to make your self-education take 20 years. You can learn by trying to reverse engineer the language through banging on the keyboard experimentation - or you can learn by doing the tutorials and following a good "How to learn C#" book. There are so many great "How do I build my first application" tutorials on the web... There are dozens of "Learn C# in 21 days", "My first C# program" type books at your local book seller or even public library.

Beginner:
C# Fundamentals: Development for absolute beginners
Build a Program Now! in Visual C# by Microsoft Press, ISBN 0-7356-2542-5 is a terrific book that has you build a Windows Forms application, a WPF app, a database application, your own web browser.

Martyr2's mega project ideas list is a great place to start on developmental projectst that you can learn from; rather than trying to make something complex like a game as a self-teaching tool {that never works for anyone}

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

D.I.C. C# Resource page Start here
Intro to C# online tutorial then here...
C# control structures then here.
MSDN Beginner Developer video series
MSDN video on OOP principals, making classes, constructors, accessors and method overloading
MSDN Top guideline violations, know what to avoid before you do it.
Design patterns as diagrams

I hate sending people to another site when we have such good tutorials here, but this series shouldn't be overlooked.
Programming OOP in C# - Part 1
Programming OOP in C# - Part 2
Programming OOP in C# - Part 3
Programming OOP in C# - Part 4
Programming OOP in C# - Part 5

Writing a text file is always one of the first things people want to do, in order to store data like high-scores, preferences and so on.
Writing a text file tutorial.
Reading a text file tutorial.

Have you seen the 500+ MSDN Code Samples? They spent a lot of time creating samples and demos. It seems a shame to not use them.

Intermediate:
The tutorials below walk through making an application including inheritance, custom events and custom controls, object serialization and more.
Bulding an application - Part 1
Building an application - Part 2
Quick and easy custom events
Separating data from GUI - PLUS - serializing the data to XML
WPF version (WPF-MVVM data binding)
Passing values between forms/classes
Decouple your multi-threaded work from the GUI so forms don't hang

Working with environmental variables
'Why do we use delegates?' thread
And everyone always wants to connect to a database, right out of the gate so Database tutorials right here on DIC

C# Cookbooks
Are a great place to get good code, broken down by need, written by coding professionals. You can use the code as-is, but take the time to actually study it. These professionals write in a certain style for a reason developed by years of experience and heartache.

Everyone:
Debugging tutorial
Debugging tips
Debugging in detail
Great debugging tips
It still doesn't work, article

I urge you to work through the C# learning series here on DIC, and to work a self-teaching book from cover to cover before you even think about designing your own applications.
Microsoft Visual Studio Tips, 251 ways to improve your productivity, Microsoft press, ISBN 0-7356-2640-5 Has many, many great, real-world tips that I use all the time.

These are just good every-day references to put in your bookmarks.
MSDN C# Developers Center with tutorials
Welcome to Visual Studio
Free editions of Visual Studio 2010

Windows Presentation Foundation:
Create Animations Programmatically

Let me also throw in a couple tips:

• You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.
  
  
• Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)
  
  
• You aren't paying for variable names by the byte. So instead of variables names of a, b, c go ahead and use meaningful names like Index, TimeOut, Row, Column and so on. You should avoid 'T' for the timer. Amongst other things 'T' is commonly used throughout C# for Type and this will lead to problems. There are naming guidelines you should follow so your code confirms to industry standards. It makes life much easier on everyone around you, including those of us here to help. If you start using the standards from the beginning you don't have to retrain yourself later.
  
  
• Try to avoid having work actually take place in GUI control event handlers. It is usually better to have the GUI handler call other methods so those methods can be reused and make the code more readible.
  
  Spoiler

  
  

  btnSave(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveMenuItem(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveContextMenu(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  FormMain_Closing(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      if (IsDirty) SavePreferences();
  }
  

  
  
  
• I strongly suggest installing VMware or some other virtualization technology on your development PC so you can create a couple virtual computers for testing. This would allow you to debug and test inside: WinXP32, XP64, Vista, Win7x32, Win7x64... etc. without having to actually have 5 physical PC's. Visual Studio will let you send the debug directly into one of these virtual machines so you can watch it operate, check its variables, see the crashes and so on just as if it were debugging on your real machine.
  
  
• This can't be stressed enough in today's world of cell phone messaging:
  Don't use txt/sms/leet/T9 speak like: u no, u r, dnt, wut i m do-n, coz, al gud, b4, ny1, and so on like this guy:
  
  dis not b d'hood dawg... You are sitting at a real keyboard with a real monitor, not a cell phone. You are not here texting your high school posse to come to your kegger after their shift at Taco Bell. You are here asking for help from senior coding professionals who graciously donate their valuable time to helping the next generation of coders with their chosen craft. Please try to show them, yourself and the industry some respect by writing at least at an eighth grade level. (IE: English not ebonics or SMS, real words, punctuation and so on). If you can't take your own problem/question seriously enough to write like an adult, then why would you expect anyone else to take it seriously?
  
  When you write a post you are presenting yourself. Your writing style is all you have to show others who you are and what you stand for. When I see posts filled with lack of capitalization, SMS text like 'Urself', lack of punctuation and so on; what I see is someone who just doesn't care to make even an eighth grade presentation of themselves. I also see that you feel we are not worth the effort. Posts that look like this show that you don't feel the person you are talking to is worth speaking to as an adult. If you show this level of contempt or apathy towards someone you are asking for help how can you expect to be taken seriously or expect to receive that expert's fullest attention and time to help you?

[icyfyer]

I understand your point, and appreciate your honsety, but must say that you underestimate the value of language immersion as a method of learning. I am currently working my way through 3 C# books, but they take an approach that they assume most people will be following in order to learn the language. The books I have are:

-C# in a Nutshell 4.0
-The C# Programming Language (4th Edition)
-Head First C#: Second Edition

I've gone through the first 3 chapters of the Head First book, and have learned how it works (it's written in a casual tone), but it addresses the language in an order that seems backward to me, past the first chapter. By the way, the book's authors understand my intent with immersion, as the first chapter makes one create a database application right from the start. The problem is that it doesn't go in my desired order of: Do this, do that, this is why. Instead, it goes through chapters of: this is a wrench and it can be used for this and that, and comes in these colors, but I won't show you how to use it yet. The other books are way too technical for the beginner. Specifically, the Nutshell is more of a reference guide than a learning manual.

I don't expect anyone to actually write the program for me; I never asked to have it written. All I need, instead of a lecture on "pick up a book" was exactly what you provided in one line: an IDEA. Now that you have told me I need to "access .Text property for each text box" I can go to the internet and ask it for assistance.

Lastly, this is not an assignment, or an attempt to create a commercial product. This application is a side project because trying to learn a language without a use for it is like masturbation. You wouldn't learn Russian if you weren't ever going to speak it, would you?

[RexGrammer]

You don't need to search the internet for that, he already told you what you need to do.

It's as simple as this:

string text = textBoxName.Text;

You store the text of a textBox to a string...

Also, I think you misunderstood the post above...

Do you have experience with some other OO languages? If you do then the way trial & error is kindda OK (well not really, but it can serve as a last resort), if you don't then don't learn from three books at once. Take one good book and go through it from cover to cover carefully... You might want to take that step-by-step approach even further, get a book just on OOP concepts and read it, then learn a language (that's how I learned to code)

This post has been edited by RexGrammer: 01 January 2012 - 09:46 AM

[tlhIn`toq]

icyfyer, on 01 January 2012 - 10:09 AM, said:

I understand your point, and appreciate your honsety, but must say that you underestimate the value of language immersion as a method of learning.

"Language Emersion" is fine for spoken languages because you already have a reference. You speak some language already. You already have an understanding of the concepts: syntax, grammar, conjugation and so on. Now you just have to learn the differences between your native language and the new one.
English: Chair Russian: stol

So let's take your statement and apply it here: Do you already have a complete understanding of another .NET language? Or another OOP lanaguge? VB.NET, Objective-C ??

icyfyer, on 01 January 2012 - 10:09 AM, said:

but they take an approach that they assume most people will be following in order to learn the language.

There is a reason these tutorial books are written in the way and order they are. Its because it works. Your 4th grade English class worked in a given order for the same reason. You had to learn the basic stuff to build a solid foundation, then add to that knowledge base with new and more advanced concepts. If you want to take the spoken language example then take it. You can't choose to take the parts you like and ignore the underlying principals of the educational process.

icyfyer, on 01 January 2012 - 10:09 AM, said:

I've gone through the first 3 chapters of the Head First book, and have learned how it works

No you haven't. You say you have already been through the first 3 chapters of one of them. Yet you have missed a very important principal/concept: That objects have properties. A textbox has a .Text property along with a couple dozen others.

icyfyer, on 01 January 2012 - 10:09 AM, said:

I don't expect anyone to actually write the program for me; I never asked to have it written. All I need, instead of a lecture on "pick up a book" was exactly what you provided in one line: an IDEA. Now that you have told me I need to "access .Text property for each text box" I can go to the internet and ask it for assistance.

You're welcome to learn however you like. But take it from the people that have done this for decades... the people that have answered thousands of questions on this forum... The people that have seen 1,000 other rookies just like you make the same arguement:
"I'm too smart to need to do it like the millions of other coders. I want to jump around and learn as I see fit even though I don't know enough about coding to even know the order I should learn in."

Keep in mind while you are jumping all over hell and gone... You're going to keep asking questions like this one... A question that would not need to be asked if you had just read through a couple chapters of a book... and its going to piss people off. You've already said that you only needed to read 3 chapters to understand how the language works. That's a pretty insulting and demeaning statement for those of use that do this for a living.

Nobody here is going to hand-hold you through the absolute basics of this, and that is what reading the .Text property of a textbox is. We are not your private tutors.

As the student you have to take some responsibility for your own education. You at least have to do the basic learning. You can't get all ADHD then expect the community to help you find what you want because you couldn't be bothered to do it the way millions of others did.

[tlhIn`toq]

icyfyer, on 01 January 2012 - 10:09 AM, said:

I've gone through the first 3 chapters of the Head First book, and have learned how it works (it's written in a casual tone),

Then why did you have to ask this question? Because this is actually covered in Chapter 3.

So this really has nothing to do with advanced educational theory, language emermsion, the author being stupid, or anything else.

This is about YOU. You need to slow down. Put in the time and effort. Do all the work. Do all the projects. Stop thinking you can just speed-read your way through select sections in order to learn what you need to learn to build the application you want. It just doesn't work that way. Go back to my earlier post with the big resources list and invest your time and effort along the path that works and will give you the biggest pay-off for your effort.

This post has been edited by tlhIn`toq: 01 January 2012 - 10:25 AM