Beginning Microsoft® Visual C#® 2008

Chapter 16. Advanced Windows Forms Features

In the previous chapter, you looked at some of the controls most commonly used in Windows application development. With controls such as these, it is possible to create impressive dialogs, but very few full-scale Windows applications have a user interface consisting solely of a single dialog. Rather, these applications use a Single Document Interface (SDI) or a Multiple Document Interface (MDI). Applications of either of these types usually make heavy use of menus and toolbars, neither of which were discussed in the previous chapter, but I'll make amends for that now.

With the addition of the Windows Presentation Foundation to the .NET Framework, a few new types of Windows applications were introduced. They are examined in detail in Chapter 34.

This chapter begins where the last left off, by looking at controls, starting with the menu control and then moving on to toolbars, where you will learn how to link buttons on toolbars to specific menu items, and vice versa. Then you move on to creating SDI and MDI applications, with the focus on MDI applications because SDI applications are basically subsets of MDI applications.

So far, you've consumed only those controls that ship with the .NET Framework. As you saw, these controls are very powerful and provide a wide range of functionality, but there are times when they are not sufficient. For those cases, it is possible to create custom controls, and you look at how that is done toward the end ...