101 Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Applications

Application #15. Bind Data to a ComboBox

One of the most common Windows Forms controls is the ComboBox control. It’s normally used to display data in a drop-down style control that is either editable (the DropDownStyle property set to DropDown) or noneditable (the DropDownStyle property set to DropDownList). A third, infrequently used style permits cycling through values without the drop-down effect (the DropDownStyle property set to Simple).

The ComboBox supports complex data binding, as opposed to the simple data binding covered in the next topic. Although it’s complex under the hood, you’ll see it’s actually easy to implement. In fact, this topic is a slight departure from previous topics because there are few new concepts. Most of the discussion ...