Customer Reviews

Data Binding with Windows Forms 2.0: Programming Smart Client Data Applications with .NET

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is about so much more than data binding. I'm not sure why they titled it this way. The book is really about forms from start to finish, including what is new in the 2.0 framework. It's an excellent work on proper forms programming and data flow. I highly recommend this book for anyone doing a lot of Windows forms work.

This book is an excellent introduction to Windows Forms in .NET 2.0, but is really not titled correctly. In particular, the subtitle "Programming Smart Client Data Applications with .NET" is blatantly misleading considering:

1. Offline data access (or disconnected mode usage), by definition a core component of smart clients, is covered for a total of 3 sentences in this book.

2. Other relevant smart client topics, such as ClickOnce deployment, are either addressed in the single "What is a smart client?" section (one page!) or ignored altogether.

I'm giving this book 4 stars because it really is a great book for those venturing into building Windows Forms 2.0 applications (also touching relevant topics like ASP.NET, WinFX and XAML), but the title should have ignored any reference to smart clients altogether. If you're a developer looking for a great resource for building apps in VS.NET 2005, this is the book for you. If you're looking for a smart client resource like I was, this is not it.

This book (as the title suggests) is strongly geared towards data binding in the context of "Smart Clients." From this book, I take "Smart Client" to mean that you are only showing tabular data directly from databases. He spends 80% of the book talking about binding to data bases with the DataGridView control. Because of this, other aspects of data binding are neglected.

After reading this book, I still had no idea how to create custom properties on a control that can be bound to with simple data binding (use the Bindable attribute, which isn't even mentioned in the book).

He does not sufficiently cover writing controls that want to use non-list data or the interfaces that non-list data objects must implement to be bound to controls.

In the end, this book is just a big example of how to use data binding, as long as you want to do exactly what is done in the samples (bind tabular data to grid views). Very little useful information that can be used to do anything outside this narrow pattern is provided.

UPDATE: I wish I could drop my rating to 2 stars. Every time I try and use this book, I'm infuriated by the lack of any useful information.

What's really cool (and missing in all the reviews and sample chapter) is how the author actually does things like they would be done in a real project. For instance, his typed dataset definition is in a dll, not lumped into the main project. He seems to make a continual effort to keep things loosely coupled and logically separated, just like seasoned programmers do. His assumption seems to be that the reader wants to learn the right way to do things, rather than just getting a surface level understanding of major concepts.

It is blatantly obvious that while the author is an excellent writer, that he got his start as an excellent developer (unlike many authors, who only code so that they can write a book about it). By the time I got 100 pages into the book, I felt like I had gotten my money's worth. The book is very informative, and is not full of filler material like so many others.

This is hands-down the most clear and helpful book on .NET I've read to date.

This is a really great book. Like most technical books it covers a lot of ground:

1. Shows through example how data binding works in windows: how to use the Binding class to bind a property on a control to a property on an object; how the new .NET 2.0 BindingSource class is used and why it was created; and a clear explanation of the currency manager and how the BindingSource class replaces it. I didn't even know you could bind arbitrary properties on an object to a property on a control. This book showed me how to do it. Too Cool!

2. A detailed explanation of how to use and extend the DataGridView. It is the best one stop shopping treatment of the DataGridView I have seen anywhere.

3. How to implement custom data-bound controls in windows forms.

4. A detailed explanation of the Data-Binding interfaces, including how to bind the DataGridView to something other then a DataTable.

5. And so much more...

I consider this one of the few .NET books worth reading. One big plus about this book is after the first couple of chapters you can skip around and read what you need to get your job done.

Using the information from this book I was able to create an adapter to our custom business object and display the data in a data grid view. Using the data grid view the user can perform the standard CRUD (create, read, update, and delete operations) on the data. This provides a nice addition to our graphical rendering. Big thanks to the author. I couldn't of done it without this book.

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Actually, I am only an expert at buying books about C# and DotNet, but an expert none-the-less.

After seeing the author's data-binding demo on dnrtv, I came here and read the reviews about this book - the reviews couldn't have been more accurate! With only two years of C# programming under my belt, I have found that chapters 7 (Understanding Data-Binding Interfaces) and 9 (Implementing Custom Data-Bound Business Objects and Collections) are alone worth the price of this book.

This book is extremely well written and easy to follow. Not really a "How To", but more of a "How To Understand How To" data-binding book IMHO.

This book lived up to and surpassed my expectations.

Going into this book, I had very little knowledge of how to implement data binding support for my custom entity classes. After reading this book, particularly the custom entity object chapter, I was able to implement very rich data binding support (filters, sorting, error provider support, etc.) to my custom classes.

Of course, all of the various pieces of information on how to implement this support is out there in MSDN or in web articles here and there. But it was well worth the price of the book to have all of these pieces put together in this cohesive text.

I thought that the book started off a bit slow, but after the 2nd or 3rd chapter, it quickly picked up with the technical details and provided everything that I needed to know.

I would highly recommend this book if you need to implement data binding support yourself.

This book provides exceptional coverage of both DataSets as well as custom objects/collections. The author also does a great job of staying very neutral about the debate of DataSets vs. Objects. It is very thorough on the intricate workings of DataBinding and does not promote a particular solution or implementation. I have been doing this type of software development for 15 years and have read many similar books and rate this among the best I've encountered. My only word of warning would be that it is not for the faint of heart when it comes to object oriented concepts. Windows Forms DataBinding is a complex topic that warrants complex instruction and documentation. If you are comfortable with the more common object oriented concepts then you will find this book an invaluable reference and instruction on the topic.

This book is a one stop shop for all your data binding needs. It is very thorough and well written. It thoroughly covers every aspect to data binding and then cover its specific use in ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WinFX, and ADO.NET with 4 appendixes.

The only downside to it is that it alludes to smart client development in the title. The only part of smart client it covers is the data binding on the UI. It doesn't cover the entire smart client gamut, like data storage, communication, or architecture in context to smart client applications.

I'm not sure where that other reviewer got the idea that this book is only for data binding to datasets.One of the best chapters in the book has fifty pages on how to prepare an object model for data-binding, and the rest of the book gives pretty much equal time to binding to objects and to data sets.

The object model chapter assumes that an application's domain model will contain the artifacts necessary for data binding. DDD practitioners will consider that to be bad practice, but the principles and procedures taught are easily applied to transport objects used in the UI. So, regardless of one's preferred style of OOP, the book provides good coverage.

Having just used the book in building a DDD app with full data binding, I can recommend it without reservation.