Who Should Read This Book?

When writing this book, I had two target audiences in mind. I wanted to provide real-world WinForms coverage for both the programmer who has already programmed in .NET and for the programmer who hasn't. Toward that end, I briefly introduce core .NET topics as they come up. However, the .NET Framework itself is a large area that this book doesn't pretend to cover completely. Instead, when I think more information would be useful, I reference another work that provides the full details. In particular, I find that I've referenced Essential .NET , by Don Box, with Chris Sells, a great deal, making it a good companion to this book. In this same category, I also recommend Pragmatic ADO.NET , by Shawn Wildermuth, Advanced .NET Remoting , by Ingo Rammer, .NET Web Services , by Keith Ballinger, and Applied Microsoft .NET Framework Programming , by Jeffrey Richter. (For more details on these books, see the Bibliography.)

Two core .NET topics are of special importance to WinForms programmers, and I cover them in more detail in Appendix B: Delegates and Events and in Appendix C: Serialization Basics. The coverage of delegates and events is particularly important if you're new to .NET, although I don't recommend diving into that topic until you've got a WinForms-specific frame of reference (which is provided about one-third of the way through Chapter 1: Hello, Windows Forms).

One other note: Many years ago, I wrote my first five-day training course. The topic was Windows 95 and included a few hours of coverage on the new controls: what they looked like, what their properties, methods , and events were, and how to program against them. Those hours seemed like days both for me and for the students. The details of a particular control are interesting only when you're putting that control to use, and when that time comes, the control-specific documentation and IntelliSense do a marvelous job of giving you the information you need. Toward that end, this book covers none of the standard controls completely. Instead, as each control is interesting in the context of the current topic ”such as the DataGrid control in Chapter 13: Data Binding and Data Grids ”that control is covered appropriately. Also, Chapter 8: Controls and Chapter 9: Design-Time Integration introduce the broad range of categories of controls that WinForms provides, including the category of nonvisual controls called components in .NET.

Finally, to give you a visual to go with all the controls and components and to introduce you to each one's major functionality, Appendix D: Standard WinForms Components and Controls provides a list of the standard controls and components. I wouldn't think of wasting your time by attempting to be more thorough than the reference documentation that comes with the .NET Framework SDK and Visual Studio .NET. Instead, this book focuses on the real-world scenarios that aren't covered in detail elsewhere.