Professional Windows GUI Programming Using C#

Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction to Wondows Forms
Review: If you've learned C# and you're ready to jump into Windows Forms, this is a great place start.

You start off by receiving an introduction to almost all of the Common Windows Controls. An in-depth look at how Databinding works and how you can implement databinding into your own controls. A pretty good introduction to GDI+ and drawing methods, which can be followed up with the book "GDI+ Programming: Creating Custom Controls Using C#" if you want to go into more detail.

The next chapter on Printing was a highlight for me. With little previous printing experience, it was a very helpful section. A nice relief too, to see that printing really is just drawing to printer instead of the screen. If you have GDI+ down, printing should be no problem.

Then the book moves on with a nice chapter on Custom Controls. A lot of great sample code in there to help illustrate what they are saying. Design Time support is highlighted upon too, to allow for reusable controls by other programmers.

Finishing up with two chapters on optimizing and deploying your Windows Applications. Good tips and knowledge that you wouldn't want to take the time to figure out your self.

Definitely one to own to get started with Windows Forms.

Rating:
Summary: Great Introduction to Wondows Forms
Review: If you've learned C# and you're ready to jump into Windows Forms, this is a great place start.

You start off by receiving an introduction to almost all of the Common Windows Controls. An in-depth look at how Databinding works and how you can implement databinding into your own controls. A pretty good introduction to GDI+ and drawing methods, which can be followed up with the book "GDI+ Programming: Creating Custom Controls Using C#" if you want to go into more detail.

The next chapter on Printing was a highlight for me. With little previous printing experience, it was a very helpful section. A nice relief too, to see that printing really is just drawing to printer instead of the screen. If you have GDI+ down, printing should be no problem.

Then the book moves on with a nice chapter on Custom Controls. A lot of great sample code in there to help illustrate what they are saying. Design Time support is highlighted upon too, to allow for reusable controls by other programmers.

Finishing up with two chapters on optimizing and deploying your Windows Applications. Good tips and knowledge that you wouldn't want to take the time to figure out your self.

Definitely one to own to get started with Windows Forms.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for GUI programming using C#
Review: This book lacks the depth that one would expect from the "Professional" series. Up to this point, I have found the Professional series of books to be quite a resource, as they usually provide information that you otherwise would not find through a cursory glance at the online documentation that Microsoft provides. I am a professional and I expect a professional level treatment of programming from this series. This book is a disappointment in this respect.

For example, there is a chapter covering the Windows common controls. The text merely describes the process for dropping each control on a form in the designer and setting a few properties, most of them obvious properties. For the complex controls, for example ListView and TreeView, very little information is provided. TreeView has about 2 pages of text if you drop out the two screen shots and more than 1/4 of that is an extremely simple code example. The ListView control has maybe 2 pages of text and a little less than 1/2 of that is code. By way of contrast, an excellent book called "Professional MFC with Visual C++ 6", although outdated as it does not cover Visual Studio .NET, had nearly 20 pages on the ListView control and 9 pages on the TreeView control, and was an invaluable resource on all aspects of Visual C++, including GUI programming.

As another example of the many omissions in Pro. Windows GUI Programming, there is no practical discussion about how forms and dialogs should be used. What events should be handled to load data and extract data from the form? When should you call Dispose on a modal dialog? Microsoft documentation says you should always call Dispose when the dialog will no longer be used. This so-called Professional book says nothing.

There are plenty of other examples of information not provided. About the worst thing I could say about this book is that its worse than the Microsoft documentation. I find myself constantly not finding what I am looking for in the book and resorting to a search of the MSDN documentation. In contrast, when using the Visual C++ 6.0 book that I was so enamoured with, I often found myself doing the opposite: searching in vain in the Microsoft documentation, only to find the topic discussed in sufficient detail in the book.

...

Rating:
Summary: This is a very poor excuse for a professional book
Review: This book lacks the depth that one would expect from the "Professional" series. Up to this point, I have found the Professional series of books to be quite a resource, as they usually provide information that you otherwise would not find through a cursory glance at the online documentation that Microsoft provides. I am a professional and I expect a professional level treatment of programming from this series. This book is a disappointment in this respect.

For example, there is a chapter covering the Windows common controls. The text merely describes the process for dropping each control on a form in the designer and setting a few properties, most of them obvious properties. For the complex controls, for example ListView and TreeView, very little information is provided. TreeView has about 2 pages of text if you drop out the two screen shots and more than 1/4 of that is an extremely simple code example. The ListView control has maybe 2 pages of text and a little less than 1/2 of that is code. By way of contrast, an excellent book called "Professional MFC with Visual C++ 6", although outdated as it does not cover Visual Studio .NET, had nearly 20 pages on the ListView control and 9 pages on the TreeView control, and was an invaluable resource on all aspects of Visual C++, including GUI programming.

As another example of the many omissions in Pro. Windows GUI Programming, there is no practical discussion about how forms and dialogs should be used. What events should be handled to load data and extract data from the form? When should you call Dispose on a modal dialog? Microsoft documentation says you should always call Dispose when the dialog will no longer be used. This so-called Professional book says nothing.

There are plenty of other examples of information not provided. About the worst thing I could say about this book is that its worse than the Microsoft documentation. I find myself constantly not finding what I am looking for in the book and resorting to a search of the MSDN documentation. In contrast, when using the Visual C++ 6.0 book that I was so enamoured with, I often found myself doing the opposite: searching in vain in the Microsoft documentation, only to find the topic discussed in sufficient detail in the book.

...

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for GUI programming using C#
Review: This is a excellent book for GUI programing with C#