VB6 developers (and users) are used to see underlined characters in the caption of buttons and label controls: these are the so-called “accelerators” because users can quickly push the button and move the input focus to the label control – more precisely, to the control that follows the label in TabIndex order – by simply typing the Alt+char key combination. (This is the character that immediately follows the ampersand (&) letter inside the control’s Caption property.)

Under VB.NET applications running under Windows XP and Windows Vista, however, by default accelerator characters aren’t underlined until the Alt key is pressed. This behavior is likely to disorient users, therefore you might want to restore the VB6 behavior. This can be accomplished by sending the WM_CHANGEUISTATE message to the form by means of a SendMessage API method.

You can achieve the same result by setting the VB6Form.ShowAccelerators static property to true when the application begins its execution, for example in the Sub Main method:

        Sub Main()
            '## InsertStatement VB6Form.ShowAccelerators = True
            ...
        End Sub