an example of which follows, also appear throughout the text, although they more often occur at the end of a chapter.

More .NET These paragraphs provide additional details about the .NET Framework or sources of additional information accessible from the Internet. The URL addresses shown in these paragraphs were valid as of January 1, 2002.

SOURCE CODE DOWNLOADS

All source code for the programs presented in Windows Forms Programing with C# is available to purchasers of the book from the Manning web site. Visit the site at www.manning.com/eebrown for instructions on downloading this source code.

AUTHOR ONLINE

Free access to a private Internet forum, Author Online, is included with the purchase of this book. Visit the web site for detailed rules about the forum, to subscribe to and access the forum, to retrieve the code for each chapter and section, and to view updates and corrections to the material in the book. Make comments, good or bad, about the book; ask technical questions, and receive help from the author and other Windows Forms programmers. The forum is available at the book’s web site at www.manning.com/eebrown.

Manning’s commitment to readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialog among individual readers and among readers and the author can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution remains voluntary (and unpaid).

Erik can be contacted directly at eebrown@eebrown.com or through his web site at www.eebrown.com.

acknowledgments

It never ceases to amaze me how the tangled threads of our lives come together to produce a tangible result, in this case the book you are reading. While the front of this book bears my name, a number of people knowingly or unknowingly contributed to its conception and development.

Special thanks go to my family: to my wife Bridgett for her patience and love; to Katie and Sydney for their regular office visits and unconditional acceptance; and to Bianca, my faithful companion, who curls up on the other chair in my office on a daily basis.

I am also grateful for my parents, David and Janet, and teachers and others who have supported me throughout my life. Special recognition goes to Steve Cox and David Cobb, who first interested me in computer programming so long ago.

Thanks also go to my many friends who provided support and encouragement in ways that only friends can do, most notably Jean Siegel, Janet Heffernan, Tony Mason, and Marc Zapf. I would also thank my soccer team, the Haymarket Outer Limits, for putting up with numerous impromptu practices while I was working on the manuscript, and yet still producing a fun and productive season.

I am also indebted to the many reviewers from all corners of the globe who dedicated their time and energy to reading early versions of various chapters. This book would not be the same without their assistance and efforts. This includes Marc Zapf for his technical review of the final manuscript; Javier Jarava for his exhaustive reviews of the code and text in each chapter; Josh Mitts for his thoughtful and encouraging comments; Andreas Häber for finding various important technical points (I apologize, Andreas, that I never did cover the PropertyGrid control); Craig Fullerton for his meticulous review of the first half of the book; Mark Boulter for his detailed comments on the original chapters; Sam Raisanen for his thorough review of chapters 1, 3, and 16; and others who provided insightful comments and criticisms, including Dharmesh Chauhan, Chris Muench, Tomas Restrepo, and Vijay Upadya.

I would also like to recognize the reviewers of my original outline, namely Steve Binney, Mark Boulter, Drew Marsh, Josh Mitts, and Kunle Odutola. Their suggestions were critical to starting the book on the right note and producing the final manuscript.

xxvi

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the many people I worked with from and through Manning Publications whom I have never met and yet provided critical support throughout the writing process. This especially includes Susan Capparelle for seeing some merit in my original proposal; Marjan Bace for his perceptive comments and suggestions over numerous phone discussions; Ted Kennedy for coordinating all the reviewers and their feedback; Syd Brown for reformatting my tables so many times and for the final typesetting of the book itself; Leslie Haimes for redesigning the cover after I had approved an earlier version; Mary Piergies for overseeing the production staff and answering my many questions; Rebecca Pepper and Lianna Wlasiuk for encouraging me to change numerous structural elements of the book; Lois Patterson for her detailed wordsmithing of the final manuscript; and finally Lee Fitzpatrick for signing my royalty advance checks.

about .NET

The history of .NET is both long and brief. While the .NET Framework is based on programming languages and development environments that came years before, it is relatively new and its success in the marketplace is yet to be proven. This section provides an abbreviated history of the C# programming language, pronounced see-sharp, and the .NET Windows Forms functionality.

The C programming language was originally developed in the early 1970s at Bell Telephone Laboratories in conjunction with the UNIX operating system. It evolved from a previous language called “B” which itself derived from a language called “BPCL.” The language became popular throughout the 1970s and was eventually standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in the mid-1980s. One of the more definitive books on C, first published in 1978, was and still is The C Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie.

The C++ language was designed by Bjarne Stroustrup, who originally published his well-known book The C++ Programming Language in 1986. This language was also standardized by ANSI and other organizations, and has grown in popularity to its rather ubiquitous use today.

The C language was used with the Windows operating system early on, beginning with Windows 1.0 in the mid 1980s. One of Microsoft’s first attempts at an interactive development environment (IDE) occurred around 1990 with Microsoft C 1.0. This environment grew to include C++ and eventually became the basis for Visual C++ in the mid 1990’s and later Visual Studio 6.0 supporting C++, Visual Basic, and a nonstandard variant of Java. The Windows operating system and Win32 API formed the foundation on which these products were built and extended.

Also worth mentioning are two competitive products for Microsoft Visual Studio, namely Borland C++Builder and Borland Delphi. Both products are highly successful visual development tools and have likely influenced the design and development of the

.NET Framework. In fact, the Chief C# Language Architect at Microsoft, Anders Hejlsberg, was one of the original designers of Borland Delphi.

Other products swirled through this history as well: dynamic link libraries, the advent of OLE and COM, database technologies such as ODBC and ADO, the growth

xxviii