The Windows Forms Team
Microsoft Corporation
May 2004
Microsoft® Windows® Forms is the core development platform for building smart client
applications. Some of the world’s largest companies, including Bank of New York,
Bear Stearns and Company, Bechtel, Credit Suisse First Boston, Dresdner Kleinwort
Wasserstein, Hewlett Packard, and Zagat Survey, use Windows Forms for their demanding,
mission-critical applications.
Our next release of Windows Forms, as part of the Microsoft .NET Framework version
2.0 and Visual Studio® 2005 (code named Whidbey), is a major release that includes
significant new features – elevating the level of functionality for client applications.
Visual Studio 2005 will also be backwards compatible with the current version of
Windows Forms, enabling smooth migration when it is released.
Our work in Visual Studio 2005 has focused around three core goals:
1.
Deployment of client applications. One or our top goals is to bring the ease
and reliability of Web application deployment to client applications. We have heard
from customers that one of the biggest difficulties with client applications today
is deploying the applications to hundreds or thousands of user’s desktops. In Visual
Studio 2005 the ClickOnce technology makes the deployment process as easy as stepping
through a wizard within Visual Studio. Additionally Visual Studio makes the packaging
and deploying of the .NET Framework and other pre-requisites the application may
require (e.g. MDAC) a simple straight-forward process.
ClickOnce brings the simplicity of Web deployment to client applications and also
provides a significant amount of power and customization to the developer and the
administrator. This power and customization ensure that the deployment processes
and methodologies within your environment are maintained.
For more information about this new feature, see the
ClickOnce feature details article.
2.
Amazing Visual Presentation. Another key goal, is to enable you, as a
developer, to fully brand and customize the visual presentation of your applications.
We have heard three pieces of customer feedback over and over again: a) you want
to build applications that look like Microsoft Office and like Microsoft Windows,
b) you want more flexibility and control over how you can position controls on the
forms, and c) you want this functionality included directly in the .NET Framework.
In Visual Studio 2005, we have added an number of new controls . For example, we
have included a new grid control, called the DataGridView, that is extremely fast,
powerful, and highly extensible. As a Windows Forms developers, you will also be
able to leverage several other new controls, including a MaskedTextBox edit control,
a Sound Player control (it does what its name implies) and a Web Browser control.
Moreover, in order to make your application look more like Microsoft Windows or
Office, we have made Windows Forms controls render with visual styles by default,
and we have created a new menu, toolbar, and status bar family of controls called
ToolStrips. ToolStrips are highly customizable and very powerful. If you do not
like the default renderers provided in the released version (one of which is Office
Professional 2003), you can customize the renderers to your own liking.
For more information about these features, see the following articles:
DataGridView
article
MaskedTextBox
article
SoundPlayer
article
WebBrowser
article
Windows
XP Visual Style article
ToolStrip
article and ToolStrip DesignTime article
3.
Developer Productivity. Yet another major goal in Visual Studio 2005 is to
enable you to build client applications faster than ever before – both by reducing
the number of lines of code you must write and by reducing the number of clicks
you must perform at design time to complete common tasks.
Smart Tags, Document Outline view, and SnapLines are three features designed to
reduce the number of clicks for common tasks. When you work with a control, its
Smart Tag will be shown. With a Smart Tag, you can quickly perform common tasks
and/or directly edit common properties for that specific control. The Document Outline
window provides a hierarchical view of all the controls. With this window, you can
quickly navigate and control the Z-order of the controls within a container. SnapLines
is a new feature that enables you to quickly align controls with each other and
the form. The alignment occurs by drawing lines between critical alignment points
of the different controls on the form. To help you reduce the amount of code you
need to write, Visual Studio 2005 introduces greatly improved support for working
with data, as well as two new controls for doing sophisticated custom layouts of
controls on forms, a new SplitContainer control that automatically splits the container
into two, and new support for user and application settings support for client configuration.
For more information about these features, see the following articles:
SmartTags
article
Document
Outline article
SnapLines
article
Improved
Data Support article
Layout
article
SplitContainer
article
Client
configuration article
We are enthusiastic about the major
improvements that Visual Studio 2005 will provide. The combination of Windows Forms
in Visual Studio 2005 and the new Visual Studio development tool features will compliment
each other well, enabling you to quickly and easily build applications like never
before.
The Windows Forms Web site for
Visual Studio 2005 (http://www.windowsforms.net/whidbey)
will be your gateway to learning about Windows Forms in Visual Studio 2005, as well
as the new client development features inside Visual Studio 2005. On this site we
will publish in-depth whitepapers that explain and demonstrate many of the new features
that you can expect in both. You can also find links to all client development-related
presentations and demonstration content from the Microsoft Professional Developer
Conference (PDC). As more Windows Forms content for Visual Studio 2005 becomes available,
we will add it to the site for you.
These guides will serve to prepare
you as we proceed toward our public beta. We hope that this information will be
a valuable resource to gain insight into the exciting new Windows Forms features
in Visual Studio 2005.
Microsoft Windows Forms
"Whidbey" and Visual Studio .NET "Whidbey" Team