Programming .NET Windows Applications

Preface

Windows Forms represents the third generation of Windows development. When Microsoft first released Windows in 1985, programmers built applications using the Windows API, typically in C. Many of us learned how to build these applications from Charles Petzold, and this is a good place to thank him for his seminal book on Windows programming.

By 1992, many programmers were building Windows applications in C++ using the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). Mike Blaszcack wrote a killer book on this topic, and it remains a classic. In essence, the MFC represented an object-oriented wrapper on the more procedural API.

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In the 1990s, the alternative to building C++/MFC applications was using VB and its Rapid Application Development environment.

Microsoft first announced the third generation of Windows development, Windows Forms, and the .NET platform in July 2000. In short, C# (and Visual Basic .NET) and Windows Forms replace C++ and the MFC as well as classic VB. This book aims to provide a complete tutorial to this new way of creating Windows applications.

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On a personal note, having spent nine years building MFC applications in C++ (and having earned much of my livelihood writing books about C++) you might expect me to have a certain resistance to the new paradigm. About an hour after writing my first C#/Windows Forms application, I said to my dog, "I'll never go back, and you can't make me." The improvements were so significant, and the increase in productivity so unmistakable, that there was no doubt in my mind that Windows Forms would totally replace C++/MFC in my development of Windows applications.