Windows Forms Programming in C#

As a computer scientist pursuing a Masters Degree, and teaching undergraduate courses, I am very picky about reading and learning material, even when choosing such material for my own education or enjoyment. Also, while I appreciate new technology, I also fear aspects of it, such as "Form Designers" and "Drag and Drop" rapid prototyping of the GUI, without knowing the hidden code underneath it all. These are all wonderful tools, but my concern has been future generations of computer scientists with only 'dumbed down' knowledge of computer science and programming languages. This book solves all of this. It not only shows you aspects of the built-in rapid GUI construction capabilities of VS .NET, but it shows you how the code works, and how to code such things by hand. However, I WOULD NOT recommend this to someone who has had NO experience in C#. I would recommend getting Microsoft Visual C# .NET Step by Step guide first, and then perhaps get this book. This book makes some assumptions about your knowledge of terminology and C# itself. Nevertheless, this is an incredible addition to any C# developer's library. It is easy to read, enjoyable to learn with, and maintains overall excellent quality throughout.

As the author of a pretty popular windows forms application ( http://www.sharpreader.net ), I thought I knew a thing or two about programming windows.forms. So, despite all the excellent reviews here, I delayed buying this book initially and just figured stuff out on my own through the .net docs, msdn and various weblogs. Now that I finally got my own copy and read it though, I see just how much I was still missing. This book is packed with tons of useful information on windows forms, controls, custom drawing, printing, data-binding, threading and web deployment of winforms apps. Not only that, but it also contains many tips on how to use Visual Studio.NET effectively to easily get to all this functionality.If you're a windows forms developer, don't make the mistake I made and get this book ASAP, you won't regret it.

I've been a big fan of Chris Sells since I discovered his website while conducting background research for a telephony project. His website is loaded with well-written and useful information for developers of all levels; this book is no different.Crammed with practical examples, this book manages to avoid what I consider the cardinal sins of most programming books: not knowing the target audience, and not knowing how thin to spread the material. Neither is an issue with this book: there is introductory, intermediate and advanced material covered throughout, none of which is at the expense of any other level; there is little extraneous information and lots of on-target information on what seems like every topic a .NET rich-client developer will face. If you are at all interested in rich-client development, be it UI, controls, components, or soup-to-nuts WinForms development, this book is for you. Where Petzold provides an excellent overview of the basic WinForms objects and namespaces, Sells fills in the gaps in Petzold and expands upon that base to cover issues faced every day by real-world developers. Buy this book; I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Before buying Chris's book, a friend recommended another book as the best C# WinForms book, so I bought that one. It was my second one on this subject. I didn't find anything useful in it, and I almost concluded that all WinForms books were going to be worthless for me. However, I still needed some good answers to WinForms questions, and resources such as the newsgroups weren't giving them to me. So I bought this book and a few others as a last effort to find intelligent coverage of this topic. Chris Sell's book totally changed my opinion of WinForms books -- Chris has shown that it is possible to cover this subject the way Troelsen covered an introduction to C# (Troelsen's book was voted best .NET book in the world, btw.)This is a highly useful book full of intelligent information. It covers the basics, but also provides depth and detail.I'm a good C# programmer, but I have done very little with WinForms. This was definitely the book I needed. I really think it is the right book for almost any level of WinForms experience. There are good tips in here that will benefit experienced WinForms developers. For example, I've seen smart people debate certain WinForms issues on the newsgroups in lengthy threads, without a clear resolution -- one quick read of a section in Chris's book could have clarified and resolved the issue(s). For every topic like this that I needed to understand, Chris took me from the basics to a full and in-depth understanding. (I almost feel like going back to all those newsgroup threads and posting answers out of Chris's book. It would make me look like a genius. If you want to be smarter than the average WinForms "expert", read this book.)

Windows Forms Programming in C# doesn't disappoint.The book quickly dives into the basics of form development, layout and resources. Even though the topic is somewhat introductory to someone who's done a lot of Windows Form development, the book is written in such a way that there was several times still found myself learning something new. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on drawing, there's always something interesting to be found when working with GDI+.200 pages later, I found myself in a chapter that discusses a topic that you rarely see in any Windows programming book - Printing. This chapter is worth the price of the book alone to have it on your shelf as a reference guide. You won't find a more detailed coverage of printing anywhere else. While I could go on and on about each individual chapter, I wanted to point out one that I particularly found helpful - Chapter 14 on Multithreaded User Interfaces. I had originally read part of this in an MSDN article, and was looking forward to the full content - and wasn't disappointed: Asynchronous operations, Safety and Multithreading, Callbacks (synchronous and asynchronous), etc. are all covered.Anyways, I could go on and on - there are plenty of tasty .NET morsels in here to keep both the novice and experienced developer consumed with this book.