Foreword
A LONG, LONG TIME AGO when I began programming PC GUIs, there were none of these fancy framework thingies. One wrote a whole lot of C code in a case statement long enough to cut a giant's undershirt out of. I'd spent a couple weeks understanding and implementing DDE (yes, DDE) in the application we were building (and frankly, it was not the most pleasant experience) when I ran across an article in a magazine showing how this fancy thing called "Smalltalk" could do DDE in a couple of lines of code. Wow! I thought. That's the way I want to program! I've been working with and on UI frameworks pretty much ever since, which is how I ended up working on Windows Forms at Microsoft.
For V1 of Windows Forms, our goal was to produce a comprehensive ...