Visual C# .NET Part 3: Visual Studio.NET at Work - VS.NET Menus and Toolbars
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Most Windows users know about Menus and Toolbars. Anyone who uses Microsoft Word or Excel or any other program on Windows knows that a
Menu is a group of related commands that allow you to perform commands by clicking on the menu name (‘File’ for example) and selecting the command (menu item) from the list. A
Toolbar is a bar that contains a group of buttons and each button contains a picture that illustrates the functionality of that button. You will find that toolbars correspond to many of the menus items. For example, there are two ways to save a file. You can click on the Save button in the toolbar or from the File Menu -> Save menu item. So consider the toolbar buttons as shortcuts to the most usable items in the menus. Something else to note about Menus and Toolbars is that the picture of the toolbar button is the same picture of the corresponding menu item. Look again at the Save button in the toolbar and then look at the Save menu item in the File menu and you will find that they have the same picture.
When you hold your mouse to hover the cursor over a toolbar button, you will get some description of the functionality of that button called “tool tip”. You can use tool tips to know more about toolbars buttons.
Shortcuts
You can execute menus and toolbars command through shortcuts. A shortcut is a faster way of executing commands. A shortcut is a combination of keys (keyboard keys) that you can press to execute the command. There are two ways to know the shortcut for a particular command:
- You can know the shortcut (if it exists) of any particular command from the menus. If there is a shortcut for a given menu item, it will be associated with it. Figure 12 illustrates the File menu and the Save menu item selected with its shortcut.
- You can know the shortcut by using the tool tip too. By default the toolbars’ tool tips will not view the shortcut of that command, but you can do that from the Tools menu -> then Customize, and you will get the window in Figure 13. Select the option tab, then check “Show Shortcut Keys in Screen Tips”.
Figure 12
Figure 13
Menus in VS.NET are dynamic, meaning the menu items can be changed depending on specific modes in the environment (VS.NET). You will see this functionality when you work with different projects and different modes in VS.NET.
There are many toolbars that you can view in VS.NET IDE. You can get a pop-up menu that contains all the available toolbars. To get this menu, put your mouse pointer on any place in the toolbars or menus and right click. This menu contains all the available toolbars that you can view. For now we need the standard toolbar which contains the save, open, new commands. It is selected by default. If you found any other selected toolbar (selected toolbars contains a check mark beside it) deselect it please. Figure 14 illustrates the toolbars’ pop-up menu and the standard toolbar selected.
Figure 14
I think by now you have a good overview of the VS.NET, so let’s get ready to create our application.
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