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WinForms learning...

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So a few posts ago, I said I'll teach myself WinForms. It's been about a month since then... and I want to share some of my learning experience.

 First off, having been a developer in Outlook, I thought I'll re-write the Outlook client using WinForms. Kind of like what Joe Stegmann did here. Here are the issues I ran into...

1)  I can't find "MessageBox"!
I am actually a little embrassed to even admit what was the first issues I ran into.  So, as in any application, I thought I'll start with a simple "Hello World" message box. I wasn't reading tutorials or anything to start. I just started with the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and selected a new Windows Forms application. I searched for "Error Dialog Windows Forms", "Warning Dialog .NET" and so forth on MSDN, Live Search, Google.. you name it. NONE of them turned up "MessageBox"!  After half an hour of fun times with the search engines, I decided to write my own.

2) Layout
In Outlook, we did a lot of own layout code. Again, I spend my fair share of time on the search engine only to find nothing useful. So again, I wrote my own. Only to find.. Windows Forms has their own layout! You can do this using the "Docking" functionality.

3) Two-way DataBinding a TreeView
Ok.. so the search engines burned me twice, and I thought, not finding a 2-way databind TreeView was my own poor skills in using a search engine. Yes... 1 hours later, I learnt... Windows Forms really doesn't have one, and I should have spent my time writing one.

I found the Windows Forms FAQ very useful during my learnng process...

What were the stuff you ran into when you first learnt Windows Forms? Do you have any good resources to share?

 <Editorial Note>
I have been playing around with WPF a lot lately... hopefully I will share my experience and some cool samples
</Editorial Note>

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 17, 2006
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    October 17, 2006
    MessageBox.Show("Here I am"); [)amien

  • Anonymous
    October 18, 2006
    That's my point... we shouldn't have to know what the search keywords are....

  • Anonymous
    April 25, 2007
    http://www.syncfusion.com/faq/winforms has some good winforms bits.