Textbox and currency formatting - vb.net

Question

I'm trying to format two specific text boxes to show up as Sq. ft. (txt.Squareft.Text) and US currency (txtTotalprice.Text) after a calculation has been made in Visual Studio 2019 as a Windows Form Application and using visual basic code. I am using .NET framework v4.7.2 and utilizing Windows 10. The way it runs now, the numbers that show up in the textboxes are just numbers without the added Sq. ft. at the end and no currency formatting. I will also add that I am very new to VB and programming in general. Any help or suggestions?
Option Explicit On
Option Infer Off
Public Class Form1
Private Sub btnCalculate_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles btnCalculate.Click
'Variables
Dim decTotalprice As Decimal
Dim decLength As Decimal
Dim decWidth As Decimal
Dim decPrice As Decimal
Dim decSquareft As Decimal
Decimal.TryParse(txtLength.Text, decLength)
Decimal.TryParse(txtWidth.Text, decWidth)
Decimal.TryParse(txtPrice.Text, decPrice)
Decimal.TryParse(txtSquareft.Text, decSquareft)
txtTotalprice.Text = decTotalprice.ToString("C2")
txtSquareft.Text = decSquareft.ToString("N2") & " Sq. ft."
' Calculate the square feet and total price
txtSquareft.Text = txtLength.Text * txtWidth.Text
txtTotalprice.Text = txtPrice.Text * txtSquareft.Text
End Sub
Private Sub btnClear_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles btnClear.Click
' Clears all the text fields with button click
txtLength.Clear()
txtWidth.Clear()
txtPrice.Clear()
txtSquareft.Clear()
txtTotalprice.Clear()
End Sub
Private Sub btnExit_Click(sender As Object, e As EventArgs) Handles btnExit.Click
' Exits the form
Me.Close()
End Sub
End Class

Answer 1

There are two primary issues here and I feel like I bring them up at least ten times a day. Firstly, you are trying to write code without knowing what that code has to do. You've considered the end result but not the steps to get there. If you had done that then it would be obvious that your code doesn't what it's supposed to. Secondly, you clearly haven't debugged your code, which is the first thing anyone should do when they don't get the expected result. That would also let you see that your code doesn't make sense IF you considered what each line is supposed to be doing as it does it.
If this was a manual task, you would get the input from the user, perform the calculation, then display the result. Is that what you're doing here? No, it is not. First you get the user input. That's a start, but you're doing it wrong. As it stands, you would end with zero for any invalid input but you're just ignoring that. The next thing you do is display the formatted output that you haven't even calculated yet. If you had debugged, you'd have seen that both decTotalprice and decSquareft are zero at that point. You finally do the calculations, but with the raw text input instead of the numbers you already parsed, and then you display the results unformatted. You've even got a comment in your code that says that you're doing the calculation AFTER you've displayed the formatted output.
Stop writing code and think about what the required steps are to get to your desired result. Parse the user input, perform the calculations with the numeric data and not the unparsed text, then display those results with formatting. Once you have a clear idea of what you have to do AND tested that manually, then you can write code to implement that algorithm, rather than some vague idea in your head that involves a final result and little else.
You're certainly not the only person who makes these mistakes but they are elementary mistakes. They happen partly because of bad teaching in some cases, but they also happen because everyone wants to jump into the part that is sexy and fun, i.e. writing the code, but they don't want to do the harder but just as important part of considering what the code actually has to do. When they don't get the expected result, they throw their hands up without ever really having tried to fix it. If you haven't tried to understand what the code has to do, you can't have tried to make it do that.