Menus are a part of every good application and provide not only an easy way to navigate within an application but also useful tools for working with that application. Take, for example, Visual Studio 2005. It provides menus for navigating the various windows that it displays and useful tools for making the job of development easier through menus and context menus (also called pop-up menus) for cutting, copying, and pasting code. It also provides menu items for searching through code.

This chapter takes a look at creating menus in your Visual Basic .NET applications. You explore how to create and manage menus and submenus and how to create context menus and override the default context menus. Visual Studio 2005 provides two menu controls in the Toolbox, and you will be exploring both of these.

In this chapter, you will:

• Create menus

• Create submenus

• Create context menus

Chapter 8.1: Understanding Menu Features

Chapter 8.2: Creating Menus

Chapter 8.3: Context Menu

Chapter 8.4: Summary