Looking for a more current Windows Forms programming book.

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Hello,
I am looking for a book that can help me get a good handle on Visual Studio 2010, forms programming. My background is C and C++ embedded programming and some basic console apps, and windows apps. I have Ivor Horton's Visual c++ 2010 and the older win API book Programming Windows 5th edition by Petzold.
I am about half through Ivor Horton's book. It is superb so far, but the sections that deal with forms are also done with MFC. Those sections would be the most useful but are basically useless to me because I have the express edition of VS2010 (no MFC).

Basically I need an orientation lesson on using the IDE, installed templates, and how to deal with the controls in the way that things are being done currently. The heavy use of classes is exposing my weakness in that area and the pertinent sections of Ivor Horton's I am not able to use.

I was looking at the books at Amazon regarding Windows forms programming and am not impressed. The most current books are of a C# slant. I found Petzold's (2005) Programming Microsoft Windows Forms and a few others but they are a bit dated.

Just need to bridge the gap in my learning.
Suggestions?

Cheers,Shane

Posted 12-Jun-11 6:33am

sawyer1

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CPallini 8-Jul-11 6:44am

Why bother? Learn HTML5 and JavaScript instead!
(just kidding, just kidding...)

fjdiewornncalwe 8-Jul-11 7:44am

Ouch.... It's gotta hurt when you tell a C/C++ guy that one... :) Cheers.

CPallini 8-Jul-11 7:52am

Like dinosaurs, C/C++/C# guys are going to become extinct soon, according to MS.

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Ger Hayden · Answer 1 · 2011-07-08T00:31:00

Solution 1

Have a look on Apress.com - you should consider some of their C# titles too. The code is easily converted to C++ in most cases.

One such tome is the "CSharp 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform" by Andrew Troelsen

Posted 8-Jul-11 0:31am

Ger Hayden

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Espen Harlinn 10-Jul-11 14:55pm

CSharp 2010 and the .NET 4 Platform is a good book about .Net, my 5

Mohibur Rashid · Answer 2 · 2011-07-10T03:51:00

You have got one great book "Win32 API Programming" by Petzold this is very good for learning development of Plain win32(both C and C++) application development. Trust me you wont get very much difference ...

And For Learning MFC(Advance C++ and Master Use of MACRO s) you have another good book by "Ivor Horton". But I guess MFC learning is little hard(at least for me at the beginning. Specially when you are all alone, not even internet).

anyway, MFC is built over win32 platform, MFC will guide you through a faster way of development. CodeSource[] is a good resource to learn both mfc and plain win32..

Richard MacCutchan · Answer 3 · 2011-07-10T06:14:00

Solution 3

If you are serious about using Windows Forms then you should switch to C# and forget C++, as it is much more intuitive. .NET Book Zero[^] by Charles Petzold is a great start and your C++ background will help you immensely.

Posted 10-Jul-11 6:14am

Richard MacCutchan

sawyer1 · Answer 4 · 2011-07-10T10:50:00

I have the .NET Book Zero by Petzold but have not put any time into C# as I have libs that were written in C++ that I must use in these projects. Basically I am learning to put a pretty face on existing code. I wouldn't have any troubles with Ivor Hortons book if the express edition of VS2010 had MFC support. In the embedded world we don't really use classes so the extensive use of classes in windows development is a tough conversion. I have learned a good bit from reading around the net and have got most of my issues worked out for the meanwhile.
@CPallini -- We dinosaurs aka, Luddites aka,embedded developers, are still using assembly like it's 1989! ohh yea!

Looking for a more current Windows Forms programming book.

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