Adding Controls

Controls are added by dragging them from the Toolbox onto the form, sizing them, and setting their properties in the Property dialog box. You can drag and drop both ActiveX and WFC controls onto your forms in Visual J++. For details about adding controls to a form, see Adding Components to a Form.

WFC controls can be grouped into three categories:

• Intrinsic controls. The basic Windows controls such as buttons, check boxes, edit boxes, list boxes, and so on.
  
  
• Common controls. The Win32 common controls found in comctl32.dll. These include controls such as animations, toolbars, tabs, status bars, and Tree view controls, to name a few.
  
  
• WFC controls. Custom controls written specifically for the WFC framework.

All existing WFC controls are Java classes found in the package wfc.ui. For a reference of all of the packages and classes in WFC, see the Windows Foundation Classes for Java.

If you want, you can create your own controls using the WFC packages, either by extending existing controls or writing your own from scratch, and add them to the Toolbox. The WFC component model makes it easy to expose information about your control's properties and events, enabling your control to work seemlessly with the Visual J++ Designer. See Managing the Toolbox to learn how to add your own controls to the toolbox.