50244: Essential Windows Forms
  Four days—Instructor-led

About this Course

This course provides developers with the knowledge and skills needed to build multi-tier user interface applications. Acquire mastery of techniques for creating custom, interactive visualizations of data, writing multi-threaded user interface applications, and connecting applications to back-end services. Explore ClickOnce deployment over the Web, Windows Forms internals, control layout, and data binding.

You’ll get answers to these questions:

• How do I handle complicated user interface layout tasks?
• How do I display database content in my application?
• How do I make my user interface responsive while performing background operations?
• What are the different deployment strategies for my application?
• What are the different techniques for embedding resources in my application?
Learn how to design and implement multi-tier user interface applications!

Audience Profile

This course is intended for developers who want to build rich client front ends to distributed applications.


At Course Completion

After completing this course, students will be able to:
 
• Build dialog, single-document interface, and multiple-document interface applications
• Use the new Windows Forms 2.0 classes, such as the ToolStrip, MenuStrip, and SplitContainer
• Integrate custom controls into Visual Studio .NET
• Customize windowing behavior through subclassing
• Use resources to internationalize your application
• Access databases and bind data to controls using the new BindingSource class
• Deploy your application over the web to create “smart clients” using ClickOnce
• Use the BackgroundWorker class to provide a responsive UI while handling long background operations



Prerequisites

• A basic knowledge of C# and the .NET framework
• Taken Essential .NET 1.1 or Essential .NET 2.0 (or equivalent experience/training)


Course Outline

Module 1: Overview

This is an introduction to Windows Forms and its place in the .NET architecture. It describes the fundamental elements of any Windows Forms application.

Module 2: Controls

The Controls module describes the core of the Windows Forms framework: the Control class. We discuss its features, and show how it makes UI development much easier than with predecessors such as VB6 or MFC.

Module 3: Forms

This section shows features for displaying and managing windows, and using the standard dialogs common to all Windows applications. Discussion of the ToolStrip and MenuStrip classes that are new to Windows Forms 2.0 is also provided.

Module 4: Applications and Configurations

This section shows various styles of lifecycle management for your applications. It also shows the options available for storing and managing the various kinds of configuration information used in .NET applications, including application and user settings, the registry, special folders, and isolated storage.

Module 5: Data Access

In this module, we show how to use ADO.NET from within a Windows Forms application, and how to bind the results of database queries to controls in the user interface. We also show how data binding can be used in other contexts without needing a live database connection. The module presents the new data binding architecture in Windows Forms 2.0, with discussion of the BindingSource and BindingNavigator classes and the INotifyPropertyChanged interface.

Module 6: Drawing

In this section, we begin by describing the windows message dispatching and painting model. We continue with discussion of the drawing facilities that enable you to take control of your application's appearance, providing custom visualization of information. The module concludes with more advanced drawing topics, specifically, double buffering, antialiasing, and owner drawing.

Module 7: Resources

Here we show the facilities for managing and localizing application resources.

Module 8: Serialization

This chapter describes the two technologies offered by the .NET Framework, and explains their pros and cons in the context of a Windows Forms application.

Module 9: Subclassing

Customizing UI behavior requires understanding how the windows layer works. This module describes the windows architecture and presents the different techniques for handling events. It then shows how to process low-level window messages to provide functionality that is not directly exposed through Windows Forms events.

Module 10: Multithreading

In this section, we show how to assure that long-running operations do not cause the user interface to become unresponsive. We discuss both single and multithreaded techniques for ensuring a responsive UI, and why the multithreaded technique is generally superior. We also show how to avoid the pitfalls inherent in using these techniques in a rich client application, and how the new Windows Forms 2.0 BackgroundWorker class facilitates writing thread safe UI code.

Module 11: Code Access Security

For many deployment models, Windows Forms applications will be subject to the restrictions imposed by .NET Code Access Security (CAS). This chapter describes how best to configure it in smart-client deployment scenarios.
This section describes the exciting new deployment strategies that Windows Forms 2.0 applications offer. It shows how to use the much talked-about ClickOnce technology to deploy an application locally or over the web.

Module 12: Deployment