Product Description

Renowned author Matthew MacDonald combines careful treatment of the API with detailed user-interface design principles. Further, this book incorporates C# and the final beta of .NET 2.0. The result: thorough coverage of Windows Forms and GDI+ namespaces for you .NET programmers! You will become equipped to design state-of-the-art Windows interfaces and program graphics, and learn how to create your own controls.

As a developer, you must know more than just how to add a control to a window. You must be able to create an entire user interface framework that's scalable, flexible, and reusable. This book is not a reference manual. Instead, it contains detailed discussions about user interface elements that you'll use on a regular basis.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #258676 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1080 pages

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 Inside Visual Basic, ASPToday, and Hardcore Visual Studio .NET, and he’s the author of several books about programming with .NET, including User Interfaces in VB .NET: Windows Forms and Custom Controls, The Book of VB .NET, and .NET Distributed Applications. 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 p2p@prosetech.com.

Customer Reviews

The controls and nothing but
Don't buy this book if you need to learn ADO.NET, file access, the common language runtime, or any other "starter" .NET topic. This book isn't a general introduction to writing a Windows application. (If you want that, read Jesse Liberty's fairly good "Programming .NET Windows Applications" instead.)

This book is a drill-down, no-holds-barred, VERY comprehensive look at programming advanced WinForms interfaces. It gives the full details on every control, complete with great advice for customizing and extending them. (Custom controls are a major theme in this book.) There's excellent content here that just can't be found in the MSDN, like tips for using layout engines, mixing web and windows contet, and multithreading an interface. This book was written with support from Microsoft's Windows Forms team, and it shows--the content on many subjects is several degrees more comprehensive that any I've seen before.

All in all, this is a stand-out choice for professional developers who already know .NET and C#.

Nice Look At Custom Controls
Pro .NET 2.0 Windows Forms and Custom Controls in C# by Matthew MacDonald provides a nice introduction (well more than that with a book that is ~1000 pages long) to controls in the .NET 2.0 world.

Since noone else has provided a chapter listing, I will do so:

01. UI Architecture
02. Control Basics
03. Forms
04. Classic Controls
05. Images and Resources
06. Lists & Trees
07. Drawing with GDI+
08. Data Binding
09. Custom Controls Basics
10. User Controls
11. Derived Controls
12. Owner-Drawn Controls
13. Design-Time Support for Custom Controls
14. Tool, Menu, Status Strips
15. DataGridView
16. Sound & Video
17. WebBrowser control
18. Validation & Masked Editing
19. Multiple and Single Document Interfaces
20. Multithreading
21. Dynamic Interfaces
22. Help Systems
23. Skinned Forms & Animated Buttons
24. Dynaming Drawing with a Design Surface
25. Custom Extender Providers
26. Advanced Design-Time Support

If you do Windows server/client development in today's day and age and want to learn about all the new controls that are offered to programmers with .NET 2.0, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book and start learning how to build forms and UI components faster than ever!!!

**** RECOMMENDED

Excellent Windows Forms and Custom Controls Coverage
This book covers everything you need to know about Windows Forms and Custom Controls. It is very thorough and well written.

The code samples work well and are well organized.

It doesn't cover the smart client gamut, like data storage, communication, or architecture in context to smart client applications. Which is ok. No book currently out covers smart client properly, but windows forms are the front end to smart clients so it would have been nice to have them placed into the smart client context.

And just to clear up the review below. Turn to page 94 for all the classic common dialogs. Mathew didn't miss anything in this book. Relate to Windows Forms UI development.

He also emphasizes using proper UI architecture and getting business logic out of the UI and develops his samples accordingly.