Ken Getz demonstrates several different techniques you can use when building Windows applications, including: Creating owner-drawn controls, binding controls to just about anything, exposing protected information with inheritance, exposing new control behavior using inheritance, handling thread synchronization with Windows forms, and creating your own property grid. Samples in both C# and VB.NET.
When DevExpress released their roadmap for 2011, WinForms barely got a mention. As a ten year old technology that is basically abandoned by its creator this isn’t too surprising. But what it interesting the amount of negative feedback that generated. A lot of DevExpress’s customers just don’t see WPF or Silverlight as a viable replacement for their major applications.
Clarity Consulting Inc. and Microsoft have released Facebook SDK 3.0, a toolkit allowing developers to write WPF, Silverlight, WinForms or ASP.NET applications integrated with Facebook.
Using tools like Greasemonkey, users are able to extend many web applications whether or not the site owners want them to. With Crack.NET, that same level of user control can be achieved over WinForm and WPF-based .NET applications.
After four years of work, Mono finally supports all 12,776 methods in the WinForms 2.0 API. Weighing in at 115,000 lines, there is the possibility for bugs.
The beta for Service Pack 1 of .NET 3.5/VS 2008 brings with is a host of new features and libraries including the ADO.NET Entity Framework and Data Services, a client-only version of the Framework, and changes to most of the 3.0 and 3.5 libraries. Despite its name, to many developers this release is as significant as 3.5 itself.
Ruby.NET, a project to compile Ruby source to .NET CIL, just released version 0.9. The release comes with improved .NET integration and a nearly complete implementation of the Ruby standard library. To top it off, Ruby.NET VS integration ships Form Builder support to help build Ruby GUI apps.
Back in September, Microsoft's VB team gave developers a way to include .NET forms in VB6 applications. In their latest CTP, they also bring you the ability to include .NET controls on a VB6 form.
A common complaint is that Microsoft restricts access to Visual Studio hotfixes. While available for free, they do require a call to customer support. In a pilot program, Microsoft has decided to release their most common hot fixes through Microsoft Connect.
Microsoft has released a Print Form component for VB 2005 and is developing a Printer Compatibility Library that will allow VB 2005 applications to use the Printer object from VB6.
Microsoft's Visual Basic Team has released a new Visual Studio Power Pack called Interop Forms Toolkit 1.0. This toolkit allows developers to embed VB.Net forms inside a VB6 application.
