8.5 Summary

Windows Forms provides a unified programming model for standard Windows application development. It does not matter what language you are using—you can always be productive because the common substrate has been developed to benefit all.

Windows Forms brings a true object-oriented programming model to Windows GUI development, allowing for an extensible framework that is much cleaner and easier to use compared to previous attempts.

In this chapter, we've shown you the architecture of the Windows Forms application. The Controls and Containers architecture, while very simple, is powerful and flexible for developing Windows-based applications. We have also shown you how to build a Windows Forms application, starting with a simple do-nothing application, then data binding, a multiple-document interface application, a self-downloading client application, and finally a Windows Forms application that pulls data from a web service.