Rating: 
Summary: A Great Find!
Review: After reading many articles on 3-tier architecture and never really understanding what the concept was exactly, finally a book that clears it up.The author explains this, as well as Windows Forms and user controls in a very eloquent manner. He has a way of relaying the information in a way that is immediately grasped. I recommend this book highly. There are a lot of Windows programming books out there for the .NET platform, some are good, but most of them only tinker around with the obvious. This one "opens the hood" and shows you the secrets of Windows desktop application programming. One thing though... in all the books I have read on Windows programming, I have yet to come across one that explains how to save and retrieve data to disk, other than the common File Stream example or a discussion of databases. This one doesn't do any better. I had to scan many internet discussion groups to finally get my answer ... serialization with binary data..... UGH! Why an in-depth discussion of binary serialization is not included in these books is amazing. What good is a desktop application if you can't present and save user data without database files. Overall though, this book met my expectations, and then some.
Rating:
Summary: Better than other Windows Forms books
Review: Every time I buy a Matthew MacDonald book, I can't wait to go get another one. The guy is a true master of writing and programming. I liked everythign about this book. It was easy to read, very interesting, filled with great examples and just all around excellent. If you want to start building your own controls, for sale or just for personal use, get this book. There are a lot of great UI books out there, this is definitely one of them....but Matthew outdid himself again. Absolutely Wonderful!
Rating:
Summary: Matthew does it again.
Review: Every time I buy a Matthew MacDonald book, I can't wait to go get another one. The guy is a true master of writing and programming. I liked everythign about this book. It was easy to read, very interesting, filled with great examples and just all around excellent. If you want to start building your own controls, for sale or just for personal use, get this book. There are a lot of great UI books out there, this is definitely one of them....but Matthew outdid himself again. Absolutely Wonderful!
Rating: 
Summary: Best book I've Seen on Winforms Programming
Review: 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 (, 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#>
Rating:
Summary: Great blend of advice, explanation, examples
Review: 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!
Rating: 
Summary: user interfaces without richTextbox control?
Review: i still can't believe it--that anyone would write a comprehensive book on windows user interfaces and forget to mention the RichTextBox control. The author devoted 3 pages to the Textbox control, but said virtually nothing about one of the the most powerful text display controls.
As said by another reviwer, there is nothing here on threading either. This book deserves 3 stars but no more because it is incomplete.
That said, I still must commend the author for a well written book that flows from one chapter to the next.
If you must get this book, bear in mind that you will have to look elsewhere to cover the omitted areas.
Rating:
Summary: A book for experienced developers moving to .Net
Review: I'm finding this book to be a tremendous leg up in transitioning to .Net from VB6. For an experienced programmer trying to move from VB language functions to .Net object methods, this book strikes the right balance in showing and describing how to use the .Net control objects. It supposes you've used each control before, and need a reliable introduction to how to employ the .Net replacement. MSDN has all the technical details you want, but is lacking in the kind of "big picture" overviews of a control. This book provides that invaluable introduction. It seems to me this encapsulates most of the knowledge it takes to consider onself an experienced .Net developer. And yes, there are VB to C# copy and paste errors, but this isn't really a C# book so much as a .Net book. And a very fine one, I'm finding.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding overview of WinForms development in general
Review: I've "grown up" in programming working exclusively with the Web, and recently moved into the very unfamiliar world of desktop development. This is a fantastic piece of work that gives you a very high-level view of the major concepts and considerations you'll need when attempting to conquer the world of Windows Forms.<br/><br/>
The book starts out with a brief discussion of some of the more visual aspects of great UI design, which, as author Matthew MacDonald describes, is as much technical as aesthetic. It then dives right into the major concepts of WinForms - forms and controls, and many of the secrets and tips on using them to create familiar, effective UIs for your apps. Examples are alternate ways of achieving drag-and-drop functionality for on-form controls, creating floating toolbars for and maintaining synchronicity in MDI apps. <br/><br/>
It's very real, very practical, and very easy to grasp. <br/><br/>
I was found MacDonald only mentioning certain class members for each of the controls, and the "members" tables listed in the book don't explicitly break the members down into properties, methods and events, which clouds a newbie's learning of a new set of classes and their functionality for the first time. That's about the only criticism I have with the title. <br/><br/>
The book's finest moment is evident in what has got to be one of the best written chapters on the often-complex topic of working with data and databinding in WinForms. It's thorough, yet easy on the brain in terms of laying out how to work with binding in simple and complex environments. <br/><br/>
The book isn't a primer on C# or on programming in general, so the code snippets are largely piecemeal, abstracted modules of much larger Windows Forms and components. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended for intermediate C# developers
Review: Mathew did an excellent job in explaining the concepts and techniques to develop UI and custom controls in C#. The book is easy to understand and the examples are easy to follow for intermediate developer. Beside some typos, VB .NET syntax/references and mismatching of online sample code and examples in the book at some places, the book is highly recommended for intermediate C# Windows UI and control developers.
Rating:
Summary: Better than other Windows Forms books
Review: Much better than Windows Forms Programming with C# by Erik Brown. This book has useful object oriented GUI design information too. I highly recommend this book.
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