Hour 18. Interacting with Users

Forms and controls are the primary means by which users interact with an application, and vice versa. However, program interaction can and often does go deeper than that. For example, a program can display customized messages to a user, and it can be finely tuned to deal with certain keystrokes or mouse clicks. In this hour, you'll learn how to create functional and cohesive interaction between your application and the user. In addition, you'll learn how to program the keyboard and the mouse so that you can expand the interactiveness of your program beyond what is natively supported by a form and its controls.

The highlights of this hour include the following:

• Displaying messages using the MessageBox.Show() method

• Creating custom dialog boxes

• Interacting with the keyboard

• Using the common mouse events