User Interfaces in VB .NET: Windows Forms and Custom Controls   Buy it at Amazon Read a Sample Chapter From The Publisher
	Author Matthew MacDonald Publisher APress Length 624 pages vbRad Rating: 4 fingers up. (4 out of 5) Reviewed by Robert

I love desktop programming a lot more than web programming, so I appreciated that MacDonald wrote this book. The paperback discusses in depth the chief controls included with the framework, as well as the basics on the Forms package, which is great, because if you are moving from classic VB, you'll be lost. This section includes discussion of "intrinsic" controls such as Labels, Textboxes, buttons and other ones such as the date picker, menu, tree view, splitter… really too many to mention here.

The second part of the book deals with more advanced topics such as creating your own custom controls, providing design-time support in the IDE and binding your controls to the data in an intelligent manner.

The author goes on to describe a dynamic user interface, one that can be created on the fly, from, say, a script, like Mozilla. This is an interesting topic, which probably deserves a book of its own. And then the book ends with a discussion of GDI+ based controls and integrating help into your application.

Overall, a solid tome worthy to sit on my shelf. It is useful as a reference, a tutorial and a manual all at the same time.