Chapter 3.6. Practical Windows Forms Applications
IN THIS CHAPTER
This section of the book has covered a lot of ground, from basic Windows Forms principles to using GDI+ in your applications. In this last chapter in this section, we'll explore the practical aspects of creating applications with Windows Forms. A critical part of the .NET framework is the ability of each object to describe itself and for you, the programmer, to access its properties. This capability can be used in your own programs to assist your users and to provide a clean and consistent user interface.
In recent years, the Windows platforms have made increasing use of “properties”. You can usually right-click a item and select Properties from the context menu. The idea of this is a good one but, until now, there has never been a standard and consistent way of displaying and editing these properties in your code. Usually a programmer would re-engineer a property system for every application with different dialogs or windows. Now, .NET provides a simple method for creating and using standardized property interfaces, the property attributes, and the property grid.