Special Edition Using Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET

Dealing with User Expectations

Users tend to have ideas about how they think Windows applications should behave. Some of these ideas make sense, and some do not. Most likely, these notions are derived from features they have seen in commercial programs. Of course, your users will then expect every simple VB program you write to behave in exactly the same way.

For example, even though your program may have an Exit button, you can count on users to click the Close button in the upper-right corner. If you forget to add code to the Form_Closed event to handle this situation, your application could keep running when you don’t want it to. The following sections describe several things about which you can count on users having expectations.

Effective ...