Rating: 
Summary: WinForm Soup to Nuts
Review: I have purchased several WinForm books but this is the one I use most. Chris does a great job covering the basics while at the same time providing a great deal of advanced material. Every topic covered is provided with code examples which makes it very easy to understand AND apply. The only thing missing from the book is a complete sample application that draws everything together. But to be fair the book covers so much material such a sample application would probably be beyond the scope of the book. If you are trying to decide on a winform book I highly recommend this book. Rest assured this book will help you get to the essence of .net winforms! Even if you don't get the book, do some searches on Chris and you'll come up with a lot of great .net stuff!
Rating:
Summary: The best book about WinForms
Review: It is the best book about WinForms, I have ever read. It is good for beginner and advanced users too, who want to write Winforms applications in c#.
Rating:
Summary: Best book I've read!
Review: I'm developer form years. I'm just starting C# programming and I've bought many books about C# and .NET. One of them are too easy (and not enough detailed for me), rest assumed that people know .NET.
This book is different.
It is really good developers guide as well as novice or advanced developer.
Describes everything in detail, including many pictures. I like code presentation style - it is not many pages code listed in book - it shows only most important part of code.
Information presented in book is very realistic - I'm sure every developer can find there answers in most cases.
I must also say about text style of book - it's written like a good story - so reading it is big pleasure!
If you are interested in Windows Form Programming in C#, using VS .NET - do not thing too long - just buy this book - you will not regret this!
Good work Chris!
Rating: 
Summary: in general, a pretty good book
Review: In general, this is a pretty good book. Chris Sells does a decent job of giving the reader an introduction to WinForms programming. The first 110 pages are truly excellent reading.
As the book progresses, however, one gets the impression that Chris is trying to jam a few too many topics into this book. Yes, WinForms is vast, and certain topics get glossed over, and the excellent flow established within the first hundred or two pages doesn't appear consistently throughout the rest of the text. I would have preferred fewer topics in more depth, and more conceptual coverage.
I got the impression that this book might have done better as a two volume set, the first with more of a conceptual hands-on coverage of WinForms with practical examples, and the second volume offering more of a reference of available Windows Forms controls and components, with plenty of references to Microsoft documentation.
So I'm giving it 4 stars. It's a very good book overall, but I can't say that it is far superior than a comparable O'Reilly/Jesse Liberty book (maybe just a bit better? maybe not?)
Rather than focus too obsessively on finding the perfect introductory .NET WinForms book, I recommend buying this or a comparable O'Reilly book without much online research, and spending more effort in your search for an intermediate->advanced .NET programming book(s). I do think that "Programming .NET Components" by Juval Lowy (O'Reilly) is just such a book, and would be worth taking a look at.
WinForms is the main starting point for .NET programming and you can expect the major publishers and authors to cover this topic well enough for you to get up to speed. Most of work required to get up to speed with WinForms involves you playing around on your own with Visual Studio .NET with the help of one of these WinForms books.
Rating:
Summary: Nice Job Chris
Review: Chris Sells and Justin Gehtland (VB.NET version) have done a nice job introducing us to WinForms development in .NET. I must admit, I have not read the entire book. I purchased the book mainly for it's discussion on No Touch Deployment, Data Validation and Data Binding.
The book taught me quite a bit on NTD and has saved me a lot of headaches and research time. In addition, Chris's tips on NTD performance defintely increased the performance of our application.
This book is a definite read for someone new to WinForms development, or for someone whose been working with it for a while and needs a reference. I find myself turning to the book at least 1-2x a week.
Rating:
Summary: Wished I had this book a year ago!
Review: I really enjoyed the book and found it quite useful. Wish I would have had it a year ago when I started working with C# forms. Did not take long to realize even my "OK", "Cancel" forms could stand a *bit* of improvement. I liked the humor - helps with otherwise dry reading. Section on multi-threading was great. This should be your first book on programming Windows forms in C#.
Rating:
Summary: A Book For Writing Real World Windows Forms Applications
Review: For any given topic there is a book or two that are a must have and Chris Sells' book falls in this category. The book covers all the key topics to building a serious production Windows Forms application including Localization, Drawing, Printing, & Multi-threading. Of all the books about this topic it covered more advanced topics than the others, particularly in using GDI+ to create customized user interface elements. I liked the book so much I accidentally bought it twice!
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: Everything changes in the Microsoft .NET Framework and the C# language, including the creation of graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Windows Forms Programming in C# explains the Windows Forms (WinForms) environment to programmers who have some experience with .NET programming, and in the process (thanks to a clear and deliberate expository style) reveals a lot about .NET to less experienced developers. The overall effect is that almost every reader comes away with better knowledge of .NET, not just its user-interface libraries and behaviors.
Rating: 
Summary: Something should be improved for next edition
Review: First I want to comment on this book only. My negtive comments do not mean other books are better than this one. I just do not know other books.
Source code problems:
When you read book, you rarely find he reference the example. You have to download the example source code from his personal web site (strange to me). Then you find it is a total mess. A lot of rubbishes are not cleaned and even the runtime exception can be seen. If the money I paid includes such code definitely I want it back.
Printing chapter problem:
Visual C# has a clear rute to control printing. That is one document plus 3 dialogs: PrintDocument, PrintDialog, PrintPreviewDialog and PageSetupDialog. But the book author put them under the topic like PrintController, PreviewPrintController which are something advanced user should know.
Controls chapter problem:
The author only talk the standard controls very very briefly. There are so many topics need more detail but missing, like LinkLabel, ListView, TreeView and scrooling picture/text/listView/TreeView. His LinkLabel cause runtime exception too. For example, how to play on the ListView and DataGrid are the big issues and I have to go to online help to learn them. If best treatment is 100% I give this chapter 50%.
Multithreaded User Interfaces chapter problem:
1. Why not to introduce Application.DoEvents(). No thread or delegation are needed any more.
2. In order to calculate 1000 digits of PI, 1000 ShowProgressHandler delegate thread are created and then garbage collected. This is wrong. The correct treatment is to create one ShowProgressHandler delegate thread and call it 1000 times in CalcPi function. Do not abuse multithread.
Rating:
Summary: Great Resource...Great Read
Review: I have a lot of technical books that are purely "shelfware" and few that I've read cover to cover. I've read this book cover to cover and am starting over again to make sure I didn't miss anything. Even though I've developed in .NET and C# for over 2 years, this book has brought numerous time savings and good coding practices to my attention. I've recommended this to others in my development teams and they are equally impressed.
There are definitely elements for programmers new to .NET as well as seasoned pros. Topics are short and to the point with well written example code.
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