Archive for 8th January 2010

VB.NET radio button groups act differently than VB6 radio button groups

The few dozen remaining WinForms developers left on this planet may have noticed that, for some reason, a group box with radio buttons in it as designed in the Visual Studio 2008 environment will have the first radio button of the first group box automatically selected when the form comes up, even though all of the radio buttons have their Checked property set to false in the design environment.  It never used to do this in VB6, as when you ran the application, the group of radio buttons would have no members selected.

The problem manifests itself when you are trying to perform additional tasks in the CheckedChanged event of the radio buttons when the user selects one of the radio buttons, since the first radio button is being automatically selected.

I asked this question on Stack Overflow, and got a couple of replies. The one that I finally used to solve the problem was to set the Checked property of the radio buttons to false in the form’s Shown event, which I had never used before. By doing this, the first radio button was no longer automatically showing up checked.

One other thing that I had to do in addition was to cast the sender into a RadioButton and look at the Checked property of the clicked radio button in the CheckedChanged event, as that event is fired for radio buttons both being turned on and also turned off.

Oh, and happy National English Toffee Day!