.NET Windows Development: Everyday Tips, Tricks & Optimization

The author's experience while consulting for teams of developers that create line-of-business applications has led to an interesting finding: Most developers of this type of applications are very proficient at writing data-input forms, data manipulation, and reports. However, they fail to apply or even consider using in their applications many useful subsets of the functionality provided by the .Net Framework Class Libraries. Occasionally, a different feature will be needed in a program. It may be necessary to display a custom graphic such as an organizational chart, or to generate a specialized report that cannot be generated by the standard reporting engine. Or perhaps the program could benefit from supporting some of the features in the latest version of Windows. Or the code that is used for persisting complex objects could be made simpler by means of serialization. In this book, we present a few techniques that can be useful for performing various tasks that in many cases will not be familiar to the intended audience, but may come handy when some new feature or enhancement is needed in an application. Some of the topics that we cover are the following: • Special techniques for accessing data • New features in Windows 7 • Using Graphics, Serialization and Reflection • Various techniques that should be well-known, but aren't. • Tips and tricks for Windows Forms applications Most tips can be used under all versions of Visual Studio. Whenever a specific minimum version is needed, it is noted in the text. A few specific examples make use of features that are new to Visual Studio 2010. All the source code for the examples can be downloaded from our web site http://www.krasispress.com