Windows Forms 2.0 Programming

1. Hello, Windows Forms As easy to use as Windows Forms is, the sheer amount of functionality it provides can make it intimidatingespecially when combined with the huge number of features in Visual Studio 2005 (VS05) so...

2. Forms In a technology named Windows Forms, you can expect the form to play a critical role. This chapter explores the basics, including displaying forms, form lifetime, form size and location, nonclient form adornmen...

3. Dialogs A dialog is defined by its use. If a form is the application's main window, it's a window and not a dialog. However, if a form pops up in response to a user request for service, such as a request to open a fi...

4. Layout In Chapter 2: Forms and Chapter 3: Dialogs, we explored the lion's share of form- and dialog-related issues, which are all ably supported by the Form class. But forms have another important, obvious role: They...

5. Drawing Basics As handy as forms are and as rich as the set of built-in controls is, sometimes neither is sufficient to render the state of your application.[1] In that case, you need to draw the state yourself. You...

6. Drawing Text Probably the most useful thing to draw in any application is text. Sometimes, you draw text yourself and, sometimes, text is drawn for you by the controls you're using. No matter who does the drawing, yo...

7. Advanced Drawing Chapter 5: Drawing Basics and Chapter 6: Drawing Text cover the basics of drawing, including colors, pens, brushes, shapes, paths, images, fonts, and string drawing. This chapter looks at advanced to...

8. Printing Drawing to the screen is usually easy because screen settings are generally constant during the run of the application. Drawing to a printer, on the other hand, is more complicated because users may change t...

9. Components Packaging code into classes is an effective way to promote code reuse and save coding effort. VS05 and the Windows Forms Designer take this one step further by providing an infrastructure that trades a pro...

10. Controls As you saw in Chapter 9: Components, it is possible to create specialized classes, known as components, which can be hosted on a form's nonvisual design surface. Components can be configured using Windows F...

11. Design-Time Integration: The Properties Window Windows Forms applications are designed and built primarily for a user-driven mode of execution commonly known as the run time. A subset of Windows Forms classes, inclu...

12. Design-Time Integration: Designers and Smart Tags The properties window is part of a broad set of design-time services that includes component designers and smart tags and which allow you to enhance the behavior of...

13. Resources A resource is a named piece of data that is bound to an assembly at build time.[1] Resources are an extremely useful way to bundle arbitrary data such as text, graphics, and sounds into your applications a...

14. Applications Applications have special support in Windows forms. For starters, you can manage and tailor your application's lifetime, and, when the work flow is disrupted by an unhandled exception, you can choose fr...

15. Settings Some Windows Forms applications can happily operate in a microcosm, but most real-world applications rely on information from the environment around them. This information can come from many sources and is...

16. Data Binding Basics Much of what Windows Forms applications do is to provide users with a nice way to work with data. Much of the data that users work with resides in a wide variety of data stores, commonly database...

17. Applied Data Binding In Chapter 16: Data Binding Basics, you saw the fundamental elements of the Windows Forms data binding system, including bidirectional synchronization, data conversion between bound clients and...

18. Multithreaded User Interfaces Windows Forms applications often need to support long-running operations, such as an intensive calculation or a call to a web service. In those cases, it's important to run the operatio...

19. ClickOnce Deployment So far, this book has focused on the development of Windows Forms applications. At some point, though, a Windows Forms application needs to be deployed. The traditional means for doing so is via...