Rating: 
Summary: Beautifully written. Packed with information.
Review: One of the first things I noticed about the book was the unique approach to the presentation of material that Chris took. Many books on GUI development take the approach of showing only one way to create applications using the wizards and designers baked into the IDE. Other books eschew the IDE completely and focus on development with nothing but text editors and command line compilers. Chris takes a hybrid approach. He recognizes the fact that many readers want to use the IDE for most if not all of their daily work, so he spends a considerable amount of time discussing the Visual Studio .Net forms designers. He also knows the importance of looking under the hood and spends quite a bit of time examining, explaining and modifying the wizard generated code. After reading this book, you should be able to use the IDE efficiently and really know what it is doing for you, so youll be able to color outside of the lines when you need to.The book is also a pleasure to read. Chris obviously has a great command of the language, and knows how to speak to the reader. You can expect an interesting and entertaining experience that keeps you turning the pages. A good portion of the book is dedicated to making standard windows GUI applications using Windows Forms. These programs have windows, dialog boxes, text boxes, buttons, labels, menus, etc. Chris starts with the basics of creating an empty window, and advances at a quick pace to creating complicated user interfaces that accept and validate data, support resizing and layout, while explaining everything in a clear and concise manner. For comprehensive coverage of the standard controls, Chris supplies Appendix D. Once you get bored with the standard controls, and trust me you will, you will want to venture out and either customize existing controls or even create an entirely new control from scratch. Again, this book wont let you down. There is in-depth coverage of drawing with the GDI+. There is excellent coverage of text and fonts, and even some discussions of why working with text is so hard, and what you can do to get it right. When you have perfected your text layout or created your masterpiece, youll find out how to create output on the printer. As anyone who has written a commercial application knows, having a flashy GUI is no guarantee of success. Many more details must be covered to turn your program into a commercially viable, quality software application. Again, Chris helps here by covering topics such as Settings, Application Lifetime Management, Resources (and localization). Once youve finished you app, you can turn to the chapter on Web Deployment and learn one way to get your application into the hands of your users. The bottom line is that Chris knows his stuff. He presents the material well. This book will help make your applications shine.
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Summary: Essential for the .NET developer
Review: 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.
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Summary: A masterpiece - every WinForms/GUI developer must read!
Review: This is an excellent book, covers the entire C#/WinForms part of .NET about as well as any single book could. Unlike other books this one is intended for those who are able to digest the MSDN and wish to take their C#/WinForms knowledge even further. After browsing through countless books that introduce me to WinForms basics, it is refreshing to find a book that dives right into some real hard-core programming. This book is not for beginners, but is indispensible for experienced C#/.NET programmers who are looking to improve their skills. This is, without a doubt, the best and most useful C#/ WinForms book I have ever read. I would suggest this book to be an essential reading for every serious .NET/WinFroms developer who wants to work smarter instead of harder. Absolutely no fluff here, every page contains interesting and useful info and the book as a whole is full of useful techniques you can use in real-world projects. It shows you loads of really neat tricks and ideas which are not available in any other books on the markert. Some of the examples are a bit raw, but the underlying concepts can be converted into successful commercial products.
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Summary: Awesome Just Awesome !!!!!!
Review: This is the best book on windows forms programming. Everything is explained in a simple manner. The author does not assume the reader to posses extensive programming experience. If you are comfortable with basic c#, then this is the book to read. This book is worth 10 times its cost.
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Summary: Great book - Writing Winforms apps? Get it!
Review: I am not really a big WinForms developer (ASP.NET is where I spend most of my time these days) but when I now and again find myself developing Winforms applications, this book will be by my side. Lots of cool graphics related stuff that I likely will not use (but lots of other folks will) and lots of the things that I certainly will need. The chapters covering Threading and deployment jump out as chapters that I will have dog-eared in no time. This is one of those books that any developer of WinForms apps should have.
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Summary: Move over Petzold, Sells is here.
Review: This book rocks! Its just under 700 pages and I haven't touched my Petzold (1200+ pages) after laying my hands on this. As clear and consise as it can get.
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Summary: Understanding WinForms with Chris Sells
Review: Chris Sells has used his knowledge and writing talents to provide a clear picture of the WinForm world, browsing each notion in the right order and explaining one complicated notion at a time when needed. After digesting the WinForms basis in the chapters 2 and 3, you'll understand how the pieces are working all together, from the Application class to the WndProc method, last frontier with the old Win32 world without forgetting features not often detailed such as the HTML help system or the MDI layout. The Chapters 4 to 6 are dedicated to GDI+ and give you a complete reference of color, brush, pen, shape, path, images, font and text. You'll see the basic stuff but also how to handle transparency, animation and optimized drawing, advanced string formatting and Transforms. If you have to send your rendering code to a printer, chapter 7 is for you: you'll learn how to use the common dialogs and how to put your code in the right place during the printing workflow. Maybe a complete document printing example would have been better for code reuse than the different smaller examples. From here, the chapters dig deeper in complicated notions and this is where its value shines. With the chapters 8, 9 and 10, you'll see how to use the existing controls and how to build your own controls that smoothly integrate the Visual Studio IDE and enhance code reuse. The localisation and resource usage in the managed world are clearly described and you won't loose hours trying to access resources in your code anymore! The chapter 11 focuses on your program execution through the Application, Registry/RegistryKey and Environment classes. The section related to the application settings and Isolated Storage itself is worth the price of the book! The mecanisms behind data access, dataset and data binding are detailed in Chapter 12 and 13. If you want to check that this book is really for you, look for Chris Sells articles on MSDN and MSDN Magazine web sites. The last two chapters about Web based deployment and multi-threaded GUI treat how to solve the same kind of problems. As you'll see, the rest of the book offers the same level of quality, with details and solutions you'll find nowhere else. I have a tiny regret: I would have expected more "under the cover" journeys based on decompiled views of .NET assemblies for an even better understanding of the relationship between classes of the Framework. I'll have to keep on playing with Anakrino and Reflector, waiting for your next "Inside/Undocumented WinForms" book Chris :^)
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Summary: Absolute excellent book
Review: I stayed up all last night reading Chris' new book. As with his previous books, this is easy to read and I enjoyed every single page. I will be keeping it by my side for quite some time as I delve more into WinForms programming. Thanks Chris for your excellent insights and once again, a fabulous book.
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Summary: Excellent for programming professionals new to C#
Review: This is one of those rare books you'd treasure long after you have finished reading it. Chris Sells' writing style makes it easy to read and follow. His examples are concise and to the point and makes C# look simple and elegant. After reading the first few chapters I was very excited and I couldn't wait to get started on a project. Highly recommended.
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Summary: Buy It Now
Review: If you are currently, or aspire to be, a serious .NET developer, then buy this book. Buy it now. Do not hesitate. After fully assimilating Francesco Balena's "Programming Visual Basic.NET" (coming from a VB6 background) and Jeff Prosise's "Programming .NET" (during my C# transition), both of which I feel are excellent books in a general coverage sense, and after wading through countless MSDN how-to's, whitepapers, and technical articles, I felt generally rounded in .NET development and what the framework has to offer. This book, however, fills in all the gaps and causes everything else to fuse together is a way that feels almost transcendent. You will come away from it feeling an increased oneness with the .NET framework. You will feel like you have "insider" information on many topics that simply aren't covered adequately, if at all, in the MSDN material. You will have a much more complete understanding of all the various properties exposed by the intrinsic and third party controls in the designer and how to implement rich, professional grade, designer features in your own controls and components. There simply isn't any doubt this book belongs on the shelf of anyone doing any kind of .NET development. The author's ability to so smoothly impart such a vast amount of knowledge in such a concise, readable, and enjoyable manner is truly wonderful. When they come out with the leather bound edition, I shall not hesitate to order another copy for proper placement next to Knuth, Petzold, and Douglas Adams.
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