User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls [Paperback]

Matthew MacDonald (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

<p><i>User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls</i> goes beyond simply covering the Windows Forms namespaces by combining a careful treatment of the API with a detailed discussion of good user-interface design principles. The combination will show you how to create the next generation of software applications using the .NET Framework. After reading <i>User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls</i>, you'll know how to design state-of-the-art application interfaces, as well as how to extend .NET controls, create data-binding strategies, program graphics, and much more. </p> <p>This book contains the following: <li>An overview of how to design elegant user interfaces the average user can understand. <li>A comprehensive examination of the user interface controls and classes in .NET. <li> Best practices and design tips for coding user interfaces and integrating help </ul> </p> <p>Although this book isn't a reference, it does contain detailed discussions about every user interface element you'll use on a regular basis. But you won't just learn how to use .NET controls&emdash;you'll learn how and why to extend them, with owner-drawn menus, irregularly shaped forms, and custom controls tailored for specific types of data. As a developer, you need to know more than how to add a control to a window. You also need to know how to create an entire use interface framework that's scalable, flexible, and reusable.</p>

About the Author

Matthew MacDonald is an author, educator, and MCSD developer who has a passion for emerging technologies. He is a regular writer for developer journals such as <i>Inside Visual Basic</i>, <i>ASPToday</i>, and <i>Hardcore Visual Studio .NET</i>, and he’s the author of several books about programming with .NET, including <i>User Interfaces in VB .NET: Windows Forms and Custom Controls</i>, <i>The Book of VB .NET</i>, and <i>.NET Distributed Applications</i>. In a dimly remembered past life, he studied English literature and theoretical physics. Send e-mail to him with praise, condemnation, and everything in between, to <a href="mailto:[e-mail]"> [e-mail]</a>.

Product Details

• Paperback: 624 pages
• Publisher: Apress (September 27, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590590457
• ISBN-13: 978-1590590454
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,020,372 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Best book I've Seen on Winforms Programming, March 23, 2004

By	David C. Veeneman (Lincolnshire, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls (Paperback)

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#>

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent tips & tricks for the working developer!, March 4, 2003

By	"shawn5191" - See all my reviews

This review is from: User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls (Paperback)

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?

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great blend of advice, explanation, examples, July 5, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: User Interfaces in C#: Windows Forms and Custom Controls (Paperback)

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!