With all of the current talk about the Web, it may appear that the Microsoft® Visual Studio® development system has de-emphasized support for building traditional Windows®-based applications. Actually, Microsoft is investing heavily in Windows-based application development.

Windows Forms is a new forms package that enables developers building Windows-based applications to take full advantage of the rich user interface features available in the Microsoft Windows operating system. Windows Forms is part of the new Microsoft .NET platform and leverages many new technologies including a common application framework, managed execution environment, integrated security, and object-oriented design principles. In addition, Windows Forms offers full support for quickly and easily connecting to Web Services and building rich, data-aware applications based on the ADO+ data model. With the new shared development environment in Visual Studio, developers will be able to create Windows Forms applications using any of the languages supporting the .NET platform, including Microsoft Visual Basic® and C#.