Customer Reviews

User Interfaces in VB .NET: Windows Forms and Custom Controls

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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I have bought a whole bunch of books about VB.NET only to find that they all gloss over Windows Forms and don't teach you very much about making rich Windows client applications with this very capable language. This book gives in-depth coverage of all of the major Windows Forms controls and lots of good advice for how to use them to present good user interfaces as well a comprehensive chapters on user and custom controls. I highly recommend it.

This book is about the details of form building. It is not about the details of backending a form to a database or website. It has a very specific remit and if you are not an experienced VB.Net programmer you could be badly caught out here. This is not a book to cut your UI building teeth on. There are introductory texts to do that. It is also not a UI design book. So don't expect lashings of advice on usability theory, design and test. They are just not here.

The focus on the book is on form controls creation and the various arcana in .Net that support them. Many interesting and useful topics are raised in the book (there is an overlap between some of these and the coverage in other books, e.g. MDi and GDI+). However, the extent to which they will generalise for the 'average' programmer is another question. I am not convinced that the book has sufficent novel content over an above other more general texts of the market.

Unless you specifically need detail about form controls, form splitters, personalised system trays etc, this book may be overkill. A good deal of topics in the book is covered in Deitel and Deitel (and more besides),and Balena. So if you are learning VB.Net be careful in your choice.

I found this book to be excellent. It isn't 100% comprehensive, but it is full of real, practical code and suggestions for using controls. It's the only book I've found that dealt with the treeview, listview, and imagelist in enough detail. Particularly noteworthy are the descriptions on how to create custom controls based on these controls that have built-in application meaning. For example, the book explains how to create a treeview that has a hard-coded "structure" and exposes custom methods for adding/navigating your type of data. Similar advice is given with validation, drag-and-drop, form inheritance, MDI workspaces, and data binding strategies. Basically, the book is a solid guide to mastering .NET controls. Note that this book isn't the best place to learn GDI+. Although there are two excellent chapters on the subject and the basic charting control, both Apress and Wrox provide dedicated GDI+ books that focus more closely on custom drawing.

Probably the best example in the book is the document-view architecture with the print preview--simple, elegant, and worth the trouble. Overall, high-content, well-written and genuinely **USEFUL**!

It is interesting to compare this book to the one by Petzold which I also regard as a "must buy" - but for different reasons. Macdonald's book is much more manageable than Petzold but still seemed to contain everything I wanted to know about Windows forms.

Petzold on the other hand is roughly twice as long and thus far more complete. Petzold is also perhaps a slightly more interesting writer than MacDonald - but then I am not sure everybody needs the details provided by Petzold...

In sum if you can afford only one book and need the definitive reference, get Petzold as it is *so* complete. However if you want a book you will turn to on a day to day basis and likey read from cover to cover get Macdonald.

I were undecided whether to buy "Windows Forms Programming with C# by Erik Brown" but then waited for this book. I totally enjoyed reading his ASP.NET Complete Reference book, know his "The book of VB.NET" is extremely good. His other ASP.NET in a nutshell book also got good reviews and i am eagerly waiting for his New Rider's ".NET Distributed Applications: Integrating Web Services and Remoting". So far he is one of my most favorite author other than Andrew Troelsen, Jeffrey Richter and Jeff Prosise - so knowledgeable and clear..!. Anybody who has read any other book written by MacDonald so far knows what i am talking.

Almost every visual basic.net control is explained with utmost clarity with their usage, examples and even design. Covers everything you will ever need to become a rich client front-end .NET developer..!

I'm a fairly new programmer in vb.net(finished vb.net II) and I found this book to be VERY good. Yes it is very theory intensive but the examples it gives are fairly straight forward and if you aren't the world's best programmer they show you how to make controls to make some really slick looking programs.

There are a few .net 1.0 examples that will not work in the new 1.1 (notably the xp theme visualizations) but this book is well worth it if you are interested in making some "professional" looking forms for your application.

For someone who has already used other languages for GUI design, this is a great book to get quickly up to speed in the .Net view of Windows forms. It didn't cover everything in enough detail for me but good enough to get me started. I would of liked more on data grid (how about a whole book on it as it's complex enough) and context menus but I eventually figured it out on my own. I could go for an advanced version of this book too.