Preface

As a fairly public figure in the Windows developer community, Chris often gets asked if he thinks that .NET is going to "take off." He always answers the same way: it's not a matter of "if," it's a matter of "when."

Microsoft's .NET Framework has so many benefits that even C++/Win32 veterans find it hard to resist the siren song of a managed development environment. It's ironic that the temporary dip in the economy has caused folks to avoid anything new just when .NET came along to deliver significant reductions in time to market and cost while simultaneously increasing code quality. The organizations that have already adopted .NET know that it's going to have a long and happy life, especially as it gets pushed further and further into Microsoft's own plans for the future of the Windows platform, both on the server and on the client.

The primary server-side technology in .NET is ASP.NET, which provides the infrastructure needed to build Web sites and Web services. ASP.NET gives developers the reach to deploy Web sites to anyone by aiming at the baseline of features offered by the middle-generation Web browsers. To provide the highest level of functionality possible, ASP.NET does most of the work on the server side, leaving the client-side HTML as a thin wrapper to trigger server-side requests for new pages of data. The server side handles almost everything, from data manipulation to user preferences to the rendering of simple things like menus and toolbars . This model provides the greatest availability across operating systems and browsers.

If, on the other hand, your targeted customers are Windows users, an HTML-based experience limits your users to a lowest -common-denominator approach that is unnecessary. In fact, in an attempt to provide a richer client-side experience, many organizations that know they're targeting Windows users require specific versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser. As soon as that kind of targeting happens, IE becomes less of a browser and more of an HTML-based application run time. For that purpose, the HTML object model is fairly primitive, often requiring that you do a lot of work to do things that are usually simple (like keeping track of a user's session state). If you're targeting Windows users, the .NET Framework gives you a much richer set of objects for building interactive user interfaces.

This brings us to the subject of this book: Windows Forms (WinForms). WinForms is the face of .NET on the client, providing a forms-based development environment meant to embody the best of the UI object models that have come before it. In addition, it has one feature that no Windows-based development framework has provided to date: the deployment features of HTML-based Web applications. The ability to combine the richness of Windows applications with the deployment of Web applications signals a completely new world for Windows developers, one that makes us more than happy to give up the mess of unmanaged code.