Why won't the button hotkey show up with an underline in VB? - vb.net

Question

I just started a self-paced course in Visual Basic using Visual Studio. One of my assigned problems is to create a form with two buttons. When the form loads, Button1 is enabled and Button2 is disabled. When you click on Button1, Button1 is disabled and Button2 is enabled. When you then click on Button2, Button2 is disabled and Button1 is enabled.
I got that to work easily, so I decided to add an extra challenge to myself. The challenge is that I want to make the disabled button show the text "Disabled" and the enabled button show "Enabled" with the "E" underlined as the hotkey for the button. I set a string variable for the enabled button containing the string "&Enabled" to enable the "E" as the hotkey. The "E" works as the hotkey, but it does not display with an underline.
I have searched the web for a fix to this issue, but I've come up dry. I also tried resizing the buttons to see if the buttons were too small to display the underline. That did not work. I have scrutinized my code, but I really don't know the language well enough to understand why the "E" does not show up with an underline. I am submitting my code and asking for help. I want to understand why this doesn't work the way I expect it to work.
This is the VB.Net code that I wrote for the form using Visual Studio 2019.
Public Class frmEnabledProblem
Dim blnButton1Enabled As Boolean = True
Dim blnButton2Enabled As Boolean = False
Dim strButton1Enabled As String = "&Enabled"
Dim strButton1Disabled As String = "Disabled"
Dim strButton2Enabled As String = "&Enabled"
Dim strButton2Disabled As String = "Disabled"
Private Sub frmEnabledProblem_Load(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
Me.KeyPreview = True
btnButton2.Text = strButton2Disabled
btnButton2.Enabled = False
btnButton1.Text = strButton1Enabled
btnButton1.Enabled = True
End Sub
Private Sub btnButton1_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles btnButton1.Click
blnButton1Enabled = False
blnButton2Enabled = True
btnButton1.Enabled = blnButton1Enabled
btnButton2.Enabled = blnButton2Enabled
btnButton1.Text = strButton1Disabled
btnButton2.Text = strButton2Enabled
End Sub
Private Sub btnButton2_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles btnButton2.Click
blnButton1Enabled = True
blnButton2Enabled = False
btnButton1.Enabled = blnButton1Enabled
btnButton2.Enabled = blnButton2Enabled
btnButton1.Text = strButton1Enabled
btnButton2.Text = strButton2Disabled
End Sub
End Class
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

In a nutshell, because this setting in Ease of Access/Keyboard is off on your computer:
Turn it on and restart your app
I wouldn't personally advocate going out of your way to force it on for your app even when it's off elsewhere in the system; just provide the &OK text on your button, and let the user decide if they want it to show like OK or O̲K depnding on their own settings/appetite for how they want their UI