Windows Forms 2.0 Programming (Microsoft .NET Development Series) 2nd Edition

I really love your wonderful book, Windows Forms 2.0 Programming in C#. It is so well-written and full of very relevant user-interface tricks and tips and I am also impressed with the way it is organized. I first found out about your book through the MSDN webpage when I was looking for how to implement a document-centric user interface in C#. And I happened upon the series of articles entitled "Creating Document-Centric Applications with Windows Forms," and I enjoyed those so much I bought the book.I am currently using Visual C# 2008 Express Edition and managed to, with your code and tips and tricks plus some third-party libraries I found off the internet, I have produced a Visual Studio-clone for Java. I love programming in C# and .NET. It's too easy.I am also a prolific programming author myself. You may have heard of me. At one point you could type my name into the Visual C++ 6 Help Search and articles would pop up if you had MSDN installed. I've also published several tens of articles in Visual C++ Developer magazine and on The Code Project.Thanks again for the great book!

The basics of Windows forms programming are fairly obvious. You drag controls from the toolbox onto the design surface, set the properties as necessary, and wire code to the events. For simple apps this is all you need to know and you typically don't need to bother with the documentation.Fortunately for us, Microsoft didn't stop with the obvious. This books contains excellent coverage of many advanced topics, including:* the form lifecycle* form extras such as tool strips, status bars, tool tips, and on-line help* drawing directly to the screen using brushes, pens, and fonts* image processing* writing to printers* creating your own components/controls, including how to fully integrate your controls into the Visual Studio design environment* how to manage resources* internationalization* user settings* data binding* multi-threaded forms programming* Click Once* drag and dropThe book doesn't try to replace MSDN. You wont find a list of properties and events for any of the controls. You will find a clearly written tutorial on the things you need to know to write a great Windows forms application.

The books dedicated to Windows Forms 2.0 are quite rare, particularly good ones, and this is one of them.Indeed it covers most of the topics in a very technical, accurate and rich manner.It's not a book for new developers and it's a good thing: don't expect bunch of useless wizards showing you how to do this or that from A to Z.The text and the code are correctly balanced and the whole is quite easy to read.The main reproach we can do to this book is the inegal and disordered way it treats topics.Some fundamental topics like layout or user-controls don't benefit from a lot of attention, for the former there is only a list of panels with some samples.The components are addressed before more important and common topics like asynchronism and multi-threading that would have deserved more attention; but in its defence in 2006 inside the .Net world the focus was less on parallelism than nowadays.Other topics benefiting from a lot of attention, like graphic rendering with the Graphics API or printing, will probably be useful to you sooner or later but are not the most important in most developments.And some topics we can consider as secondary, like designer integration, particularly with smart-tags (which benefit from a whole dedicated chapter!) are of importance only for components vendors but are of little or no importance for the average developer.The book is also missing concrete use-cases showing how to use the technology the right way.As an example architecture and design of a Windows Forms application are not addressed.Likewise the development of user-controls is only touched upon whereas it is fundamental in building reusable components, particularly the interaction with a business model.So this book is a good reference, while not perfect, but don't expect it to teach you how to develop, and even less how to correctly develop, with WinForms, it only gives you the basic bricks, but you'll need other resources, like your own experience and some technical articles, to build a wall.

I own Chris Sells "Windows Forms Programming in C#". This is an absolutely excellent book. I was expecting that "Windows Forms 2.0 Programming" by Chris & Michael will be mainly an update and extension to version 2.0. Unfortunately, this is not the case at all. The book is a mess with bits an pieces all over. Compared to the formarly mentioned book the examples are bad and often not very helpful. The index is terrible, too. At the time I bought this book (I ordered it before it was out) it was the only one about Windows Forms 2.0. If you find another one don't buy this book. If there is no other one, well, I guess then you don't have another choice...