Adding controls to a window:

Well this is exactly the same as VFP. You pick controls from various toolbars, basic controls like buttons, complex controls like rotating cubes and spinning carousels, OLE controls, etc. Your click the windows/form and there it is. Many controls automatically fire up a wizard to help you design and define its functionality. You can then double-click a control to edit the various visual options, data-binding and other aspects of it. For example, attached are some screenshots for a simple button.

WinDev has many pre-defined variations of controls - for example, when you choose a button you can get:

> A plain button (VFP style)
> On/Off buttons
> Timer buttons (auto-close after a time)
> Print buttons (auto-loads the printer dialog)
> Browse button (auto-load a disk browser)
> and more variations.

Another example, for drop-down list boxes you can just choose:

> A country list (pre-filled with countries)
> A titles list
> Industry (a long list of possible industries)
> World currencies
> World languages
> and many more

These pre-defined buttons or list boxes or whatever saves you having to create the specifics of very commonly used controls, the building of it and a lot of the coding of what to do with it when users interact with it. If you choose a hyperlink button then you only need to supply the URL and it knows what to do with it from there. If you need a list of currencies then drop that on the form, ink it to a variable or table field and done.

Controls can also, obviously, have code associated with them. Opening the code window for a control immediately shows you all the possible code sections that the control can have. In the case of a button there are just two; (1) the init code, and (2) the click code. And you can easily access all these code sections in a single editing window.

Lastly, everything in respect to the user interface is driven by internal style-sheets of which WinDev comes pre-set with many. You can make your app look like a Vista app, an Apple Mac app (Leopard), an ActivUbuntu app, or Office 2007, etc. You do that by just selecting the style to apply and all the controls and GUI aspects change (unless you have chosen to override visual aspects on particular objects). You can also edit these style-sheets and create additional ones.

See the screenshots for further insight – using a simply button for the example. You can see that it’s not just a long list of properties like VFP but rather breaking down the different groups of options and applicable settings into a series of tabs and letting you see the effect of making changes right there in the dialog before choosing to apply it.