.NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference

.NET Windows Forms are a powerful technology for building a large class of applications for the Windows .NET platform. They offer nearly the same power and flexibility of classic Win32 development, but for a fraction of the effort. The programming model is lean and streamlined, and many of the tedious details that developers used to have to spend time on are now dealt with automatically by the platform. .NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell offers an accelerated introduction to this next-generation of rich user interface development. The book provides an all-inclusive guide for experienced programmers using the .NET Windows Forms platform to develop Windows applications, along with a compact but remarkably complete reference to the .NET Framework Class Library (FCL) Windows Forms namespaces and types. The authors present solid coverage of the fundamental building blocks, such as Controls, Forms, Menus, and GDI+, and enough detail to help you build your own fully featured reusable visual components so you can write visual component libraries as well as standalone applications. .NET Windows Forms in a Nutshell aims to provide not just the practical information and advice required to get programs working, but also to communicate the rationale behind the various parts of Windows Forms' design. The authors show how the thinking behind the framework enhances your productivity substantially. The new framework allows you to guess correctly what "the Right Way" to do things is a majority of the time, even if you've never tried what you're doing before. No more digging around in documentation for days to try to find the bit of information you need to use one particular feature. Anyone who is involved in user interface development will appreciate the ease of creation and expanded capabilities provided by .NET Windows Forms, as well as the in-depth focus and straight-forward approach this book brings. Included on CD is an add-in that will integrate the book's reference directly into the help files of Visual Studio .NET.

Ian Griffiths is an independent consultant specializing in medical imaging applications and digital video. He also works as an instructor, teaching courses on .NET for DevelopMentor. Ian holds a degree in Computer Science from Cambridge University.

Matthew is the Director of Development at Digital Healthcare Ltd. The last three years have kept him fully occupied in the development of a C#/.NET-based distributed imaging platform for healthcare applications. Before that, he studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University, worked on banking and imaging applications in North America, became a fully-paid-up C++ junkie, and was the lead architect on software solutions for drug-discovery for a large US corporation. He thinks that .NET is a major philosophical stride forward for the computer industry: so much so that he almost doesn't miss his first love - generics - in C#. He has written articles and given papers on the subject to both technical and non-technical audiences, and looks forward to the day when he doesn't have to answer the question 'So, what is .NET?' any more!