Creating Your First Windows 8 Application

  • 12/15/2012
Contents

Running Visual Basic Applications

To run a Visual Basic program from the development environment, you can do any of the following:

  • Click Start Debugging on the Debug menu.

  • Click the Start Debugging (Local Machine) button on the Standard toolbar.

  • Press F5.

Try running the My Web List program now. If Visual Studio has difficulty compiling your program or displays an error message, you might have made a typing mistake or two in your program code. Try to fix it by comparing the printed version in this book with the one you typed, or load Web List from this book’s sample files and run it.

TIP

When you run the My Web List program, you will use the WebView control to display live information from the Internet in your application. By default, if Visual Studio encounters any type of error when loading web pages into the WebView control, it will display an error message in a dialog box entitled “Visual Studio Just-In-Time Debugger.” If you click “Yes” in this dialog box, you will enter debugging mode (or break mode) and be able to learn more about the error message. If you click “No”, you can suppress the error message and keep running the My Web List program.

Internet script errors can occur for a variety of reasons on the web. Most of these errors are simple warning messages that are not too serious. To suppress Just-In-Time script debugging for now, while you are still getting your feet wet with Visual Studio, I recommend that you click Tools | Options | Debugging | Just-In-Time, remove the check mark from the Script check box, and then click OK. After you complete this chapter, you can restore this setting.

Run the My Web List program

  1. Click the Start Debugging button on the Standard toolbar (the green arrow button with the words “Local Machine” next to it).

    The My Web List program will compile and run in the IDE. After a few seconds, the user interface appears, just as you designed it. The Microsoft MSN web site (http://www.msn.com) appears in the first text box as a sample web site you can browse to.

  2. Click the Visit Web Site button.

    The program uses the Navigate method of the WebView1 object to access the site. The web site appears in the web view object, and the web site URL appears in the second text box on the page. Your screen will look like this:

    httpatomoreillycomsourcemspimages1561544.jpg

    Click to view larger image

  3. Enter a new URL in the first text box, such as http://www.plu.edu, and then click Visit Web Site. (This is the university where I teach, but you can substitute your own favorite web address.)

  4. Visual Basic immediately adds the web site to the list of visited sites and loads the webpage into the web browser. Keep in mind that the content in the web browser is live—you can click around within the webpages and move from link to link as you would on a normal webpage. To see webpage content that is not currently visible, simply press the Down Arrow key or rotate the mouse wheel.

  5. Enter a third URL in the text box, such as http://msdn.microsoft.com, and then click Visit Web Site.

  6. Enter a fourth URL in the text box, such as http://www.microsoftpress.oreilly.com, and then click Visit Web Site.

    Your screen will look like this:

    httpatomoreillycomsourcemspimages1561546.jpg

    Click to view larger image

    Now that you’ve entered four or five web sites, you can begin to see the value of the web site address list that is slowly accumulating in the second text box. Visual Basic offers you the power to track all types of information, including a list of the web sites that you have visited. If you would like to save the list for future use, simply select the contents of the text box with your mouse, press Ctrl+C to copy the list to the Clipboard, open an application such as Notepad or Microsoft Word, and then press Ctrl+V to paste the list into the open document.

When you’re finished experimenting with the Web List program, close the application. You’ve just tested your first Windows application!

Sample Projects on Disk

If you didn’t build the My Web List project from scratch (or if you did build the project and want to compare what you created to what I built as I wrote the chapter), take a moment to open and run the completed Web List project now, which is located in the My Documents\Start Here! Programming in Visual Basic\Chapter 02 folder on your hard disk (the default location for the practice files for this chapter). If you need a refresher course on opening projects, see the detailed instructions in Chapter 1. If you are asked if you want to save changes to the My Web List project, be sure to click Save.

NOTE

The Start Here! programming series is designed to be a hands-on learning experience, so you will benefit most from building the projects on your own as you read this book. But after you have completed the projects, it is often a good idea to compare what you have with the practice file solution that I provide, especially if you run into trouble. To make this easy, I will give you the name of the solution files on disk before you run the completed program in most of the exercises that follow.

After you have compared the My Web List project to the Web List solution files on disk, reopen My Web List and prepare to compile it as an executable file. If you didn’t create My Web List, use the book’s solution file to complete the exercise.

Save to your account

This chapter is from the book