Rating: 
Summary: dodges multithreading
Review: No detailed coverage of the Progress Bar control. Reason: so that multithreading and concurrency could be avoided. It is a common GUI programming task to allow a user to cancel a long running operation while keeping the GUI updated and responsive. However, this requires spawning off a separate thread to handle the long-running operation. That thread must also be able to communicate with the main GUI thread. This must be performed carefully but it is easily done by experienced GUI programmers. You won't get coverage of that with this book. Good luck....
BT
Rating: 
Summary: Good overall coverage, not clear on details
Review: Take this as a personal opinion: I needed this book for a project. It explains quite well the infrastructure, but when it comes to implementation you'll only need the source code that's online and your beloved MSDN CDs. I was expecting a clearer explanation on details, such as creating custom designers(which is a must if you're developing your own controls). The source code examples might be worth the price, therefore I don't regret this purchase... but I would have waited for some good Wrox title on this matter if I had to choose.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent tips & tricks for the working developer!
Review: This is the first book I've read on .NET that provides amazingly practical examples--and there are lots! Early examples include thumbnail menus and irregular forms, and before long the book shows full-brown examples like a vector drawing app, animated text, and dockable windows. By far the best material is on using custom controls to represent specific "types" of data. For example, you can create a TreeView that "knows" its structure and provides custom methods that skip dealing with the nodes directly. Amazing! These examples alone are worth the price of the book... not to mention tips on making visual inheritance actually work in a UI design, and really useful custom controls like a directory tree that adds nodes "just-in-time" and an image browser that shows thumbnails for all the pictures in a directory (optimized using threads, BTW). The book convinced me that if you can visualize a control, you can build it in .NET. Now if there was just something like it for ASP.NET!!There is one critique I would add. This book probably isn't for the die-hard control developer who plans to sell their own custom .NET controls. Although the book does cover control licensing, IDE support, etc, I think much more info would be needed on this subject. For example, although the book talks about using the basic control designers with your custom controls, it doesn't show you how to build a control designer from scratch for more design-time features. Maybe in a future edition?
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