Chapter 1. .NET and Windows Forms Overview

In early 2002, Microsoft shipped .NET, a suite of new technologies for Windows first announced in the summer of 2000. The attendant media frenzy concentrated on its support for web services, but .NET has far greater scope than that—it could change the way all Windows programs are written. .NET offers greatly improved productivity to developers by replacing swathes of the Win32 API with new, much higher level object-oriented APIs, allowing you to focus on the task at hand without being distracted by myriad petty details.

This book is about the technology behind Windows applications that run on this new .NET platform. In particular, it focuses on rich client applications—i.e., traditional interactive programs with a graphical user interface (GUI) that run locally on your computer. Although web applications have become very popular in recent years, experience with these thin clients has taught us that there is still very much a place for the more traditional style of Windows application. If you've ever had to switch from Outlook to a web mail service when working away from the office, you know just how much web applications leave to be desired.

The new programming interface for writing Windows applications with GUIs is called Windows Forms. This replaces all the old programming models, and not just the C++ favorites, such as MFC or raw Win32, but also the Forms package used in Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier. Windows Forms combines the best features from all these models, and it is the long term future of Windows development.