Welcome to the Ranch, Kate!
Netbeans is not a programming language nor is it a GUI framework. It's an Intelligent Design Environment (
IDE), which means that it's an application whose sole purpose is to assist you in designing, implementing and
testing applications. When an application moves into production, the IDE goes away.
Part of what an IDE may provide is "wizards" that can help in automatically generating application code and resources, but when all is said and done, your application isn't an "Netbeans" application, it is (in your case) a
Java Swing application.
So I'm linking this
thread to our Swing forum, since you can get a lot of help on Swing there even from people who don't use NetBeans.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.