# Overview

The visual designer is still a work in progress so please do not assume that all functionality is available and/or working correctly. The purpose of this release to show the progress of the visual designer to date and to allow input from users regarding its direction and whether changes in basic design philosophy should occur at this point.

The forms and controls are being implemented via the WinFormsX library that is also a free and open source PlanetSquires product that is available on GitHub.

The rest of this document will give you a bare bones introduction to the use of the visual designer and code to perform various tasks.

The visual designer will automatically generate code whenever something changes related to a form or control. The generated code is based on the syntax of the WinFormsX library.

When the code is first generated, the visual designer will output an additional line:

    Application.Run(Form1)

That line essentially bootstraps the form so that it will display. Obviously you don’t need a line like this for every form that is generated. You can safely move that line to a main source file so that it only runs once at program startup. Any subsequent similar generated lines for other forms can be safely deleted.

WinFBE generates a TYPE structure for every form in the application. That TYPE extends a bass class called wfxForm which contains the core functionality of a form. You can find the wfxForm source code and all other source code for other controls such as wfxLabel, wfxTextBox in the WinFormsX include folder. A global shared variable is generated for each form TYPE. For example, if your form is named Form1 then the shared variable is also named Form1.

    Dim Shared Form1 as Form1Type

If you have controls on your form then you access them via dot syntax. For example, if you have a button called Button1 located on the form called Form1 then you access the button via Form1.Button1

    Form1.Button1.Text = "Cancel"