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One of the major goals for Visual Studio 2005 is to enable developers to build client applications faster than ever before both by reducing the number of lines of code and by reducing the number of steps that you need to perform at design time for common tasks. Throughout this lesson, we will point out the new wizards and productivity enhancements that you have available in Windows Forms 2.0.

Another big improvement to Windows Forms is in the arena of controls. We offer a number of new controls. Combine with the wizard; the new controls make it easy to produce visually appealing and data rich applications. In this section, we are going to build a project from scratch.

First, we will show you the project and then we will show you how to build it. Let us begin by taking a look at the project.

Go to your Desktop, your Project Files Directory, Part 1, Lesson 3, and you will see a special days two folder. Go ahead and select that. Go down into the special days two. Go down again into the bin directory. Go ahead and double click on the debug directory, and now, you will see a special days two executable. This is the executable that you are going to create yourself. Let us click on it to see what it does.

As you can see, you see a calendar as well as the button called clear and an area on the right hand side of your screen. What this application will do is remember special days that you would like to keep tract of. All you have to do is click on the date and the date is automatically added to the right hand side. Go ahead and click on another date and you will go ahead and see that date added as well.

The clear button allows me to clear the calendar completely. Although this is a simple application, it will demonstrate good use of the container controls which you see here as well as the list you control, the calendar control which is really a set of smaller controls as well as events and buttons. Close this out and go ahead and close out this window. Now, let us go ahead and create the project.

The first thing you will need to do is go ahead and launch Visual Studio 2005. In this case, we are going to create a windows form application. So select File, New Project. We are going to use the sharp as our language of choice. Navigate down to the C sharp node and select Windows. Select Windows application and let us give it a name. In this case, we will call it your special days.

Let us go ahead and select a directory for this. Hit the browse button. Go to your Desktop. Go to Project Files. Go to Part 1 Lesson 3 and go ahead and choose Open to save this in this directory. Click Okay, and now your project will be created.

Let us adjust the form slightly. Go ahead and use your mouse to make the form a bit wider and a little shorter. Next, we will have to give the form a name. Click on the form and go to the properties window. Let us go ahead and give it an intelligent name. Let us go ahead and call it your special calendar.

One of the major goals for Visual Studio 2005 is to enable developers to build client applications faster than ever before both by reducing the number of lines of code and by reducing the number of steps that you need to perform at design time for common tasks. Throughout this... click to read more