E. Mitchell said
No where in the title, cover or product description does it explain that this covers a very old version of Windows Forms programming that is no longer relevant today. I had not looked for the publication date when choosing this book (silly me). The author put the manuscript to bed in April 2003 and the book was published in September of 2003.
If you are completely new to Windows Forms, realize that this book was written to about Visual Studio 2003 .NET standards. Huge changes have been made to Visual Studio and .NET since then (major revision being Visual Studio 2005 and 2008).
When you read the assorted reviews here on Amazon, you'll note that most reviews are dated around 2004 or so.
This book should be fully updated to a new edition or taken off the market. Being six years old, and with .NET and Visual Studio both having undergone several revisions since then, this book has limited relevancy in 2009. I regret that I purchased this book.
Alen Milakovic said
Contains all the essential information and a little bit more but not much more. Over all a pretty good starter book.
Rick R said
I'm a Java programmer who finished reading O'Reilly's "Programming C#" (very good book), and wanted to get started in Windows Forms programming. Chapters 1 and 2 were decent and Appendix B was an excellent introduction to Delegates and Events.
The rest of the book, however, was very weak. All it did was give a brief summary of some of the windows forms components (and the coverage was very weak). If you want to learn about a component you are going to have to look it up it on MSDN.
I was hoping the book would give me something other than what I can get by looking at an API. I was really hoping there would at least be a few chapters on how to design Windows Forms applications - there was nothing. The easy part is learning how to use a component. The difficult part is learning best practices about design an application - something this book didn't touch.
Also, I'm not sure how the rest of the books in the "Microsoft .NET Development Series" are, but I think it's very cheap and dishonest to make a book 'appear' weighty. The book is 680 pages, but the margins, line spacing, and text are all very large. This book easily could have been half its size.
Ian Ringrose said
The second edition is out that covers Windows forms V2, you may want to buy it instead.
Ruben Bartelink said
I got this book after having already done quite a bit of WinForms programming and found it a compelling read. I'd have read after a platform/language primer but before doing any actual WinForms work, had I had it in my possession at that time.
Its the first programming book in some time that I read as a 'page turner' - it's that well-written (in prose terms).
It's also very well copy-edited, which shows that a lot of effort went into getting the book just right, which can't be said for all books (I guess the gap between release of .NET 1.0&1.1 and this book allowed for that more than in other books).
As for the relevance of the information, I believe it to be very relevant to a wide variety of application types, regardless of that being the main criticism I see in other reviews here. I guess that comes from the fact that you can't please all the people all the time. Still, I'd venture it comes as close as any other book is going to come.
For me it's very near the top of the must-have books if you're going to be writing non-trivial production WinForms apps.
One thing to be aware of is that the .NET 2.0 version is on the way in the coming months, making it Essential unless you're not in a position to use 2.0 stuff.
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