.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell (Paperback)

~ (Author), Matthew Adams (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell offers an accelerated introduction to this next-generation of rich user interface development. The book provides an all-inclusive guide for experienced programmers using the .NET Windows Forms platform to develop Windows applications, along with a compact but remarkably complete reference to the .NET Framework Class Library (FCL) Windows Forms namespaces and types. .NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell offers an accelerated introduction to this next-generation of rich user interface development. The book provides an all-inclusive guide for experienced programmers using the .NET Windows Forms platform to develop Windows applications, along with a compact but remarkably complete reference to the .NET Framework Class Library (FCL) Windows Forms namespaces and types. The authors present solid coverage of the fundamental building blocks, such as Controls, Forms, Menus, and GDI+, and enough detail to help you build your own fully featured reusable visual components so you can write visual component libraries as well as standalone applications.

About the Author

Edited by Nicola White, Acting Head of Department, Central St Martins College and Ian Griffiths, Professor of Fashion and Visiting Lecturer, Kingston University, Design Consultant MaxMara.

Adams is the director of development at Digital Healthcare, Ltd.

Product Details

• Paperback: 936 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596003382
• ISBN-13: 978-0596003388
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,025,784 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A must read for any WinForms .NET Developer, March 1, 2004

By	Greg Robinson (Richmond, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This was the 3rd or 4th WinForms book I purchased. The others were good, but they were lacking in detail. This book does a great job in explaining 'under the cover' details. The authors do a good job explaining DataBinding, Controls, GDI+, Form, Menus, Inheritance and much more.
This is more than a resource book. The first half is devoted to getting you up and running with building WinForms apps. The 2nd half is an incredible reference, one I turn to almost daily.

If you plan to use or are using .NET WinForm, please, do yourself a big favor, buy this book and leave it on your desk

4.0 out of 5 stars An API Reference especially for DataGrid using ADO.net, September 17, 2003

By	Phil Lee (Minneapolis, Minn, Silicon Tundra, USA) - See all my reviews

The authors appear to go to great length for completeness in a companion reference for programmers creating DotNet Forms, an important new feature of the DotNet frameworks. We have been always looking for a capable web enabled report writer without integrating a third-party product, such as Crystal Reports for the Web. DotNet Forms promises in creating at least simple, yet dynamic, multi-paged reports without a whole lot of work.

DotNet provides for creating dynamic Excel-like forms for ASP.NET html. Additional form paging provides for DB presentation similar to Yahoo and eBay searches, which is a familiar and intuitive format. DotNet provides these DataGrid forms with the DotNet Forms API. The API architecture is listed in the last two-thirds of this book, which is an inch and a half thick.

While the authors claim to include a "very fast-paced" tutorial (p1) in the first third (313 pgs) of the book, the DataGrid portion is a mere 6 pages (p307-312), very steep indeed! I'd highly recommend its combined use with another MS Press book by Dino Esposito (0-7356-1578-0) which devotes about half of his book to DataGrid reports and code examples. Another is Jesse Liberty's O'Reilly book on VB.Net (0-596-00438-9) which has one chapter devoted to ADO.net (34pgs).

The publisher include a MS Visual Studio.Net Add-in on the accompanying CD which has the text of the book as integrated help files, 1.7MB MSI files for VS.Net 2K2 and 2K3. Appears a tad bit small? I have not tested the usefulness of the claimed dynamic integration of the O'Reilly Help files along with MS Help during coding process within VS. It appears that this is the initial product enhancement from this publisher. I wonder if an annotatable PDF file of the book would be more useful; at least this would be in a separate window. This tome was read at a local library.

At a local SQL Server Users Group meeting, a new technology that will embellish on the DataGrid and Forms was discussed and demoed. It is the forthcoming SQL Server 2K Reporting Services that will be a low/no cost add-on for SQL 2000 Server and authoring with a Visual Studio.Net 2003 download. It currently is in beta and will be released in 4Q03. It appears to be XML based and production reports can be rendered for browser, printer, PDF, and TIFF output. What a seemingly great idea.

Overall, this detailed 469-page reference on the DotNet Forms API appears needed for the programmer, although this is probably duplicates what's available on a MSDN subscription CD somewhere. The appendix includes another 69-page API term cross-reference and a 23-page index.

11 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This one isn't like the others..., April 19, 2004

By	Geoff Switz (Richmond, VA United States) - See all my reviews

Databinding is handled later, and lots of interesting stuff I wasn't knowledgeable about came sooner. Bravo. This is a great book that will always be on my desk! (I'm a professional developer with walls of books by Microsoft on Wrox, primarily.)