Introduction

When Visual C# .NET first arrived on the scene, developers everywhere were hit with a vast wave of documentation and tutorials from magazine articles, books, and Web sites. The obligatory "Hello World" programs were popping up left and right as developers began their path to understanding this new language created by Microsoft. Those days of learning this exciting new technology are now gone for some developers, and they now need more in-depth material ”material that corresponds to the tasks you need to accomplish while developing your application. Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003 Developer's Cookbook will help you make that transition from learning to doing.

Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003 Developer's Cookbook is divided into parts corresponding to the technology within Visual C# .NET. These parts each contain several different recipes to help you understand a single task without having to read several pages of introductory material. Each recipe is carefully constructed to first show you how to accomplish a task using a certain technique and then to follow with comments that provide a closer inspection of the solution.

Along with the immense array of task-specific recipes is a large collection of source code, which is freely available on the Sams Web site, http://www.samspublishing.com. Most recipes in this book utilize source code contained within an application developed for the task it is explaining. Even though some of the source code might be terse and to the point, some of the applications would make a great stepping stone to larger, more involved solutions. For instance, Chapter 10, "Programming Graphics with GDI+," uses the source code from an image-editing application with full support for image scaling, cropping, rotation, and even a print preview dialog. Chapter 8, "Windows Forms Controls," contains the source code for an autohiding docked tool window, similar to that used within the Visual Studio .NET 2003 Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Additionally, Chapter 13, "XML in .NET," contains a full XML editor, and Chapter 16, "Building ASP.NET Applications," contains a clever Web application that acts as a remote command-line shell for ASP.NET-capable Web servers.

Visual C# .NET is an exciting technology that allows you to create feature-rich applications while shortening the development cycle. Because the technology itself has a large scope, keeping tabs on all the information is a daunting if not impossible task. Microsoft Visual C# .NET 2003 Developer's Cookbook provides the help you need when you just want to know how to perform a single task, and it offers real-world, application-specific information. The companion Web site for this book, http://www.csharpcookbook.com, provides additional material and a way to contact the authors for more information.