What Windows Forms Is Today

The goal of this chapter is to provide an overview of the Windows Forms technology summarizing how Windows Forms works and how you can take advantage of recent .NET features. This is because Windows Forms has been for many years the one and only user interface platform, whereas with the growth of Windows Presentation Foundation, it becomes necessary to provide information on this quite new technology. Windows Forms is quite obsolete when compared to the power and flexibility of WPF, but .NET Framework necessarily needs to provide support for Windows Forms because it is settled in application development, but you have to know that Microsoft will no longer invest in Win Forms. This means that you can, of course, use it in your applications, but the strong suggestion is that you begin taking a serious look at WPF because tomorrow’s user interfaces will be based on it. This chapter assumes that you have at least one year of experience in developing Windows applications with Windows Forms. If not, or if you are not interested in getting information on what’s new, you can skip this chapter and get friendly with WPF in Chapter 31.