Executive Summary

Great book on understanding and customizing Windows Forms! Quoting the book’s foreward given by Shawn Burke, Development Manager, Windows Forms Team, Microsoft Corporation:

Matthew MacDonald … has built a great resource for developers using Windows Forms to create great, rich applications. Whether the goal is to write components for internal use or a full application, this book will help you get there and deliver great results.

Mr. Burke goes on to say:

The practical, task-based approach, of Pro .NET 2.0 Windows Forms and Custom Controls in C# allows it to cover a wide range of Windows Forms topics, but still provide the technical depth to help developers deliver features. While many other resources read more like technical reference docs, Pro .NET 2.0 Windows Forms and Custom Controls in C# does an excellent job of filtering the information down to what developers really need to harness the power and innovations of Windows Forms 2.0 to deliver truly world-class client applications.

I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Burke. Since I’ve had the book, there hasn’t been a day gone by that I haven’t found at least one answer to my WinForms problems.

Background Information

I picked up this book off of my co-worker’s desk two months after my initial foray into WinForms development. Previous to that time, for six months, I had been doing service oriented development with .NET 1.1 in C#. During that stretch, I also developed and maintained a couple internal ASP.Net applications. And previous to those six months, I had never worked in C#, C++, or C. In fact, the majority of my programming life has mainly been in web development, specifically PHP, MySQL, DHTML, and JavaScript. All in all, at the time I picked up this book, my experience level in developing WinForms and Windows applications was very limited.

Initially, I used the book only as a reference. For that purpose, it was terrific. Then this past week, I finally decided to read it from the beginning, hoping to at least learn a few things by the time I finished reading the 900+ pages. And to my surprise, I have already learned several new concepts in the first couple of chapters, such as the difference between a Control and a Component and accessing the Screen object.

My Purpose

To make my .NET world a more peaceful place, one WinForms control at a time. Seriously, though, I want to share my experience as I read and try out the concepts found in Pro .NET 2.0 Windows Forms.