Customer Reviews

User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am very tempted to give this book five stars, which I rarely do. It's that good.

I expected the usual run-through of forms and controls, but this book goes much deeper than that. Several chapters devote themselves to design issues in three-tier applications-- how to move information between a presentation layer and a business layer in an orderly, organized fashion. Since VS.Net is used so often for sloppy database front-ends, good advice has been hard to come by in this area.

So why only four stars? This book appears to be a port of an earler book covering the same issues within the context of VB.Net. That doesn't detract from the quality of its content, but the editors missed a few translations from VB to C#. These misses are pretty minor; for example, VB-style brackets are used on attributes (<attribute>, instead of [attribute]), and internal classes are described as being preceded by the 'Friend' keyword.

Subject to those minor qualifications, I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn how to program WinForms, and to anyone who wants to learn how to design a proper three-tier application in C#>

This is the first book I've read on .NET that provides amazingly practical examples--and there are lots! Early examples include thumbnail menus and irregular forms, and before long the book shows full-brown examples like a vector drawing app, animated text, and dockable windows. By far the best material is on using custom controls to represent specific "types" of data. For example, you can create a TreeView that "knows" its structure and provides custom methods that skip dealing with the nodes directly. Amazing! These examples alone are worth the price of the book... not to mention tips on making visual inheritance actually work in a UI design, and really useful custom controls like a directory tree that adds nodes "just-in-time" and an image browser that shows thumbnails for all the pictures in a directory (optimized using threads, BTW). The book convinced me that if you can visualize a control, you can build it in .NET. Now if there was just something like it for ASP.NET!!

There is one critique I would add. This book probably isn't for the die-hard control developer who plans to sell their own custom .NET controls. Although the book does cover control licensing, IDE support, etc, I think much more info would be needed on this subject. For example, although the book talks about using the basic control designers with your custom controls, it doesn't show you how to build a control designer from scratch for more design-time features. Maybe in a future edition?

I rarely write reviews, but I had to comment on this book! Matthew MacDonald has done an excellent job putting together a readable, interesting book that gives you the basics on all .NET controls, and answers your more advanced questions. For me, it cleared up hit testing, multithreaded controls, and data binding to pictures. The TreeView/ListView discussions are much better than anything I've found in other books. I also loved the well written discussion of best practices that occurs throughout the book--the document/view architecture example with a dynamic print preview was particularly good. Now I just wish I could find a book with this much detail about the ASP.NET controls!

Mathew did an excellent job in explaining the concepts and techniques to develop UI and custom controls in C#. The book is easy to understand and the examples are easy to follow for intermediate developer. Beside some typos, VB .NET syntax/references and mismatching of online sample code and examples in the book at some places, the book is highly recommended for intermediate C# Windows UI and control developers.

No detailed coverage of the Progress Bar control. Reason: so that multithreading and concurrency could be avoided. It is a common GUI programming task to allow a user to cancel a long running operation while keeping the GUI updated and responsive. However, this requires spawning off a separate thread to handle the long-running operation. That thread must also be able to communicate with the main GUI thread. This must be performed carefully but it is easily done by experienced GUI programmers. You won't get coverage of that with this book. Good luck....

BT

I'm finding this book to be a tremendous leg up in transitioning to .Net from VB6. For an experienced programmer trying to move from VB language functions to .Net object methods, this book strikes the right balance in showing and describing how to use the .Net control objects. It supposes you've used each control before, and need a reliable introduction to how to employ the .Net replacement.

MSDN has all the technical details you want, but is lacking in the kind of "big picture" overviews of a control. This book provides that invaluable introduction.

It seems to me this encapsulates most of the knowledge it takes to consider onself an experienced .Net developer. And yes, there are VB to C# copy and paste errors, but this isn't really a C# book so much as a .Net book. And a very fine one, I'm finding.

i still can't believe it--that anyone would write a comprehensive book on windows user interfaces and forget to mention the RichTextBox control. The author devoted 3 pages to the Textbox control, but said virtually nothing about one of the the most powerful text display controls.
As said by another reviwer, there is nothing here on threading either. This book deserves 3 stars but no more because it is incomplete.
That said, I still must commend the author for a well written book that flows from one chapter to the next.
If you must get this book, bear in mind that you will have to look elsewhere to cover the omitted areas.

Much better than Windows Forms Programming with C# by Erik Brown. This book has useful object oriented GUI design information too. I highly recommend this book.

Every time I buy a Matthew MacDonald book, I can't wait to go get another one. The guy is a true master of writing and programming.

I liked everythign about this book. It was easy to read, very interesting, filled with great examples and just all around excellent.

If you want to start building your own controls, for sale or just for personal use, get this book. There are a lot of great UI books out there, this is definitely one of them....but Matthew outdid himself again.

Absolutely Wonderful!

Windows Forms are getting to be obselete, except that the Microsoft Management Console Plugins still use them, and Microsoft still uses it's Management Console for lots of Enterprise level software. Because of that this book is still quite useful to have in your arsenal of C# books. It covers it'subject quite well, and extensively. Even if you thought you knew everything there was to know about Windows Forms, I think you will be surprised by how much you can learn from this book.