I am looking for a book that will act as part tutorial and part reference.
I having been working with .NET for a while but mainly in the land of the middle tier. I am moving to the thick client and specifically user controls and windows forms development. I have a bit of experience in this area but I am looking for a book that will take this much further (I definately don't want a beginners book).
Any suggestions
Best Book for Control Development
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Best Book for Control Development
jim from the foothills
Teddy076
1. User Interfaces in C# by Matthew MacDonald - I think he has a matching title if VB.Net is your life style choice :-) A very good book, nice coverage of basic controls, new controls and custom controls. Decent section on databind controls and GDI+. While a good introduction, doesn't have the legs to be the "ultimate" reference. My meaning on that is that after doing Winforms for a little bit, you realize the simplicity of the examples. But still the best book on my shelf for Winforms.
2. Professional Windows Forms by Jason Bell et al. - Typical Wrox book, lot's of authors, decent content. Basically a match to MacDonald's book in coverage, maybe a slight edge in the deployment section and the Winforms in Web Pages ( ) sections. Just not very well written but I picked it up at a Wrox fire sale for like $7.50 or something.
3. Professional Windows GUI Programming by Wahid Choudhury et al. - another Wrox title with a bunch of authors. Thinner book with less detail but the only coverage on UI threading issues and printing which are concerns of mine. But the rest is a similar simple rehash of what's out there on the web. Also picked up at halfpricecomputerbooks for like $5 or something.
I've got a couple of all around C# books that hit Winforms, but in a real high level "Hello World" style. I've heard great things about Windows Forms Programming with C#
by Erik Brown but I'm always leery of buying a book that I haven't actually flipped through...my shelf is loaded with crummy books that I bought site unseen...I'll have to get Borders to order this book so I can look at it first.
Not a great wealth of true "professional" level books out there...my apologies to any author reading this that has a good book. Real pro level Winforms is going to be like advanced GUI's with MFC or VB6...not gonna be a lot (if any) of books on the subject. Luckily this site exists...it's the best.
pgruderman
I own the following book:
.NET Windows Forms Custom Controls
Richard Weeks
ISBN 0672323338
It's not thick and not extensive and if you already know a lot of control development, then don't buy it. But if you want to get started, then this a good book. It helped me on a couple of occasions (e.g. designers etc.). This book is about control development, not userinterface development in general. Look for Windows Forms books if you want information about general userinterface development under .NET.
Another book I found (I don't own it so I don't know if it's any good!!!!):
Developing Microsoft .Net Controls With Microsoft Visual Basic .Net
Connell, John
ISBN 0735619247
Regards,
Paul