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Chapter 3

Intrinsic Controls

In Microsoft Visual Basic jargon, intrinsic controls (or built-in controls) are those controls visible in the Toolbox window when you launch the environment. This important group includes controls, such as Label, TFextbox, and CommandButton controls, that are used in nearly every application. As you know, Visual Basic can be extended using additional Microsoft ActiveX Controls (formerly known as OCX controls, or OLE custom controls) either provided in the Visual Basic package or available as commercial, shareware, or even freeware third-party products. Even if such external controls are often more powerful than built-in controls, intrinsic controls have a few advantages that you should always take into account:

For all these reasons, it's important to learn how to make the best of intrinsic controls. In this chapter, I focus on their most important properties, methods, and events, and I also show how to address some common programming issues using intrinsic controls exclusively.