The Windows controls include the following:
At the core of these visual parts are the native Windows controls. The native Windows controls are wrapped in VisualAge Smalltalk, which provides them with a standard VisualAge public interface. You can use these visual parts as you would any other VisualAge visual parts.
Some of these parts are similar to other VisualAge visual parts. For example, the Windows Track Bar is similar to the Slider in the Buttons category. An obvious question is when to use a Windows visual part and when to use another, similar visual part.
There are advantages and disadvantages of using either of the types of parts. The advantage of using the Windows visual parts is that you get controls which include the base Windows controls and are tuned to a Windows desktop graphical user interface environment. The disadvantage of the Windows visual parts is that they are not portable to OS/2, and the UNIX platforms that VisualAge supports. In general, you should use the Windows visual parts if matching Windows graphical user interface control behavior is more important. You should use the other, corresponding visual parts if portability to other platforms is more important.
In the next several sections, we'll look at these visual parts in a little more detail and build up a simple example illustrating their use.