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User Interfaces in VB.NET: Windows Forms and Custom Controls
by Matthew MacDonald

Publisher: Apress Buy it Now! 

ISBN: 1590590449
Format: Paperback, 624pp
CD: NO

There are basic principles in UI design and being either a Microsoft lover or hater, certain trends have to be followed, but with new .NET framework some of the previously nightmarish API tasks (especially if you are coming from VB 6 world) required for topnotch user interfaces become laughingly easy and can be achieved with just a few lines of code or even better, by setting a couple of properties in design-time.

User Interfaces in VB.NET: Windows Forms and Custom Controls - represents a fine insight to .NET UI design methods. Now, it all depends what kind of background knowledge you have, but I guess that developers that are moving from VB 6 to .NET would gain the most benefit from reading this book. It's not just that all the code examples in this book a written in VB.NET, but it's most likely that an average VB 6 developer would be much less familiar with terms like anchoring, docking or form inheritance. Delphi programmers have used some of these features without API headaches for quite some time, so they might not feel the urge to purchase this book, though they may be interested to see how .NET handles all the stuff they are used to.

The things I like about this book are nicely planed chapter hierarchy and a thorough, yet finely paced approach with non-exhaustive and pretty much useful examples (like embedding thumbnail bitmaps to .NET menus or creating a floating toolbar in MDI window). Starting with the evolution of user interfaces, the author introduces the modern trends of UI design with the accompanying problems and conventions. After brushing through the basic control class and well known classic controls with useful menu and drag&drop examples, the content moves towards the more advanced form class and modern controls (TreeView, ListView, ToolBar and StatusBar). The chapter about forms is in my opinion one of the best parts of a book as it represents a strong reference to form scrolling, interaction and overall handling and I would consider it as a "must read" for every .NET newcomer (also, my compliments for the effort of explaining how to include Windows XP styles in this chapter). The chapters about custom controls and their design-time support probably won't satisfy demanding control developers, but they can serve as an excellent starting point for .NET control development beginners. Ok, I have to be honest here and admit that since I dealt quite a bit myself with .NET custom controls I expected a bit more info here. Personally I would have liked a whole book about design-time support and I know this wasn't primary topic in this book, but still I would have liked a bit more about serialization, type converter classes, designer classes, etc. The next chapters are more advanced and provide some intriguing techniques for UI data integration, MDI development and dynamic UI creation (with an interesting examples of system tray application and vector-based drawing). Now, the following chapters came to me as a really pleasant surprise because I didn't expect so much about graphics in this book. The author included the whole GDI+ basics chapter for the purpose of explaining owner-drawn controls. The final chapter deals with help and support implementation, which is sometimes considered as a hideous task, but necessary for every serious application.

I don't want this to sound like I am advertising this book, but I can't truly say I've found a part of it that I particularly dislike. Good organization and example selection leave a high overall impression.