Customer Reviews

Pro .NET 2.0 Windows Forms and Custom Controls in C#

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Don't buy this book if you need to learn ADO.NET, file access, the common language runtime, or any other "starter" .NET topic. This book isn't a general introduction to writing a Windows application. (If you want that, read Jesse Liberty's fairly good "Programming .NET Windows Applications" instead.)

This book is a drill-down, no-holds-barred, VERY comprehensive look at programming advanced WinForms interfaces. It gives the full details on every control, complete with great advice for customizing and extending them. (Custom controls are a major theme in this book.) There's excellent content here that just can't be found in the MSDN, like tips for using layout engines, mixing web and windows contet, and multithreading an interface. This book was written with support from Microsoft's Windows Forms team, and it shows--the content on many subjects is several degrees more comprehensive that any I've seen before.

All in all, this is a stand-out choice for professional developers who already know .NET and C#.

Pro .NET 2.0 Windows Forms and Custom Controls in C# by Matthew MacDonald provides a nice introduction (well more than that with a book that is ~1000 pages long) to controls in the .NET 2.0 world.

Since noone else has provided a chapter listing, I will do so:

01. UI Architecture
02. Control Basics
03. Forms
04. Classic Controls
05. Images and Resources
06. Lists & Trees
07. Drawing with GDI+
08. Data Binding
09. Custom Controls Basics
10. User Controls
11. Derived Controls
12. Owner-Drawn Controls
13. Design-Time Support for Custom Controls
14. Tool, Menu, Status Strips
15. DataGridView
16. Sound & Video
17. WebBrowser control
18. Validation & Masked Editing
19. Multiple and Single Document Interfaces
20. Multithreading
21. Dynamic Interfaces
22. Help Systems
23. Skinned Forms & Animated Buttons
24. Dynaming Drawing with a Design Surface
25. Custom Extender Providers
26. Advanced Design-Time Support

If you do Windows server/client development in today's day and age and want to learn about all the new controls that are offered to programmers with .NET 2.0, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book and start learning how to build forms and UI components faster than ever!!!

**** RECOMMENDED

This book covers everything you need to know about Windows Forms and Custom Controls. It is very thorough and well written.

The code samples work well and are well organized.

It doesn't cover the smart client gamut, like data storage, communication, or architecture in context to smart client applications. Which is ok. No book currently out covers smart client properly, but windows forms are the front end to smart clients so it would have been nice to have them placed into the smart client context.

And just to clear up the review below. Turn to page 94 for all the classic common dialogs. Mathew didn't miss anything in this book. Relate to Windows Forms UI development.

He also emphasizes using proper UI architecture and getting business logic out of the UI and develops his samples accordingly.

I have the author's .NET 1.0 version of the same book, so I knew this would be good. But when it was delivered I was amazed--it's more than twice as long and packed with advanced content & examples. I haven't found any book that covers the new .NET 2.0 controls (like the DataGridView, ToolStrip, and WebBrowser) in such exhaustive detail, including page after page of amazing ways to extend them. If you're at all interested, I recommend you check out the table of contents on the Apress site, and you'll be sold. After all, how can a WinForms book disappoint when it has 9 chapters about custom control development?? Not to mention multithreading, a basic doc-view framework, and the best guide to using the new layout features I've found to date.

Highly recommended.

This book gives a good overview of each control, but is really centered on teaching you how to develop custom user controls and how to get them to work well with the VS 2005 IDE (Tool panel and Properties window). It also covers owner drawn controls using GDI+. The downloadable code samples demonstrate everything in the book. However, it doesn't appear that the author actually tried to compile all of them, as there are many with fixible errors (mostly project setup ones), and one, that uses an xlst file to install a SQL database that does not have the required procedures. Thankfully, the author responded to me with questions I had and sent me a new database file. One major positive is that the book is not filled with code listings. The author only shows the specific code segments that he is talking about. I learned a lot from this book. It loses a star though for the sloppy C# program examples.

Since the moment when I took this book in my hands and was able to make practice with the examples on this book, I was able to feel recognized the simplicity in the complexity of the controls.

The examples are clear and very well done, impeccables and flawless a good thing for the newbie and the old programmer.

I am enjoying the controls that allow me to click on them and assign my own properties.

I've read quite a few books on Windows Forms applications which include creating custom controls. There are some that are average and there are some that are very good. Usually the average books tend to touch on the simpler aspects of windows forms and forms controls and not go into much detail, which is OK for the novice programmer dabbling in .NET for the first time. However, the more experienced programmers among us want much more. In this respect the very good books tend to be a little over the top for the average user.

This book falls somewhere in the middle for novice and experienced programmers alike, whilst still being rather good. It offers a good discussion on what makes up the underlying architecture of Windows Forms applications which many books lack. The .NET IDE attempts to hide a lot of the nuts and bolts behind the outer layers and generally you shouldn't touch what's under the covers. But occasionally you need to, especially when using visual inheritance because that's when the IDE starts the go a little haywire. By understanding a little about what's happening underneath goes a long way in helping you get out of the mess when the IDE does screw up.

The book covers most of the interesting forms controls .NET 2.0 has to offer and describes them in better detail than what can be found in the relatively useless MSDN on-line help. The code examples given are excellent, concentrating on real-world scenarios. A good portion of the book illustrates how to extend these controls further using custom controls and GDI+ owner drawing to modify the look and feel of these controls.

The book also concentrates on developing 3-tier applications isolating the presentation layer from the business logic and data layers, which is a highly recommended practice for developing scalable applications.

The book doesn't include a CD but all the code examples can be downloaded from the publisher's web site.

Overall I give it 4 out of 5.

I haven't finished reading the book yet, but so far I am quite pleased with it.

This book has already paid for itself in just a couple of weeks -- due to the time saved in trying to find the information I need. Every time I have a question regarding an issue in Windows Forms or with Custom & User Controls, I can find it here. Additionally, the content is written in a manner that can be understood by mere mortals, with some good tips and tricks thrown in too.

Highly recommended.

On the merits of this text, I've already purchased Matthew MacDonald's WPF book (the 3.0 one, since I haven't *quite* moved to VS 2008 yet...).

I needed this book for a training course on Windows development in .Net. It helped a great deal to have a good reference that was not the same as the book used in the course. Sometimes I found the examples a little hard to follow because of the distraction of the scenarios shown, but when I boiled them down to what they were meant to present, they were very helpful.