Question

I am creating a chess program. And it is composed of sixty four picture boxes with alternating black and white background colours.
I have named them pba1, pba2, pbb1, pbb2, pbc1 and so on.
Now, I want to loop through only the black ones, for example, I want to loop through only, pba1, pbb2, pbc3 and so on.
How do I create a loop for this in VB.NET?

I know of the way to loop through similarly named controls, but I am not able to adapt that method for my problem. Can you tell me a solution?

EDIT: In pba1, pb stands for picture box, and a1 stands for the square. Just in case, you wonder why such a name.

EDIT: Check out this answer

Answer 1

Generating controls at design time via the Forms Designer only makes sense for layouts which benefit from the forms designer.

In your case, you just have 64 uniform boxes in 8 rows of 8. Don’t use the Forms Designer for this, create the controls at runtime, and don’t give them names like pba1, just put them into an appropriate data structure (such as an 8×8 array):

Private chessFields As PictureBox(8, 8)

' In Form_Load:
For i = 0 To 7
    For j = 0 To 7
        chessFields(i, j) = New PictureBox
        ' Set size, position … then, finally,
        Controls.Add(chessFields(i, j))
    Next
Next

That way, you can access the fields in an orderly fashion without having to go via the Form.Controls collection.