Lesson 13.2 – Creating functions to handle user input

Lesson Objectives

At the end of this lesson, you will know…

• How to create functions to handle button clicks in the UI

Creating functions to handle the user’s input

Here’s a video of me creating the functions that will be run when a player presses a button on the screen.

Link to video on YouTube

Step 1: Start Visual Studio Express 2013 for Desktop, and open the solution.

Step 2: Right-click on the SuperAdventure.cs for, in the SuperAdventure project, then select “Open” or “View Designer”.

Step 3: Double-click on each of the buttons on the form – the four direction buttons (North, South, East, and West) and the two “Use” buttons that will be used for combat.

It doesn’t matter what order you do these in.

After you double-click each button, you’ll be taken to the “code” part of the screen and be placed where the new function was created. This is where you can write the code that will run when the user presses the connected button. So, when the user clicks the “North” button, this will be the code to “move” the player to the location to the North.

Something you don’t see when you do this is the code that gets created to connect the buttons to the new functions.

You might have noticed that the code for the UI screen says “public partial class SuperAdventure : Form”. The word “partial” is important here. There is another part of this class that you don’t normally see. This is the part that connects the controls (buttons, comboboxes, etc) in the UI to the code we’ve been looking at.

We haven’t looked at the other part of this class, because we’re not focusing on how to build the UI in these guides. However, it’s something you need to be aware of if you’re creating Windows Form programs.

There are also other things you can handle from the UI. These are called “events”.

In this case, the only event we care about is when the button click. However, there are dozens of other events that can be handled. For example, many controls have an “OnMouseOver” event – when the user moves the mouse over the control. For that event, you might do something such as change the background color of the control – so the user knows where the focus is.

Summary

Now you can create functions to handle the common user actions in the UI – in this case, when the user clicks on a button. Right now, the functions don’t do anything. So our next lesson will be to start writing our functions, to let the player play the game.

Source code for this lesson

These is no source code for this lesson

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