Although there are many more enhancements and additions in Windows Forms 2.0 than we can talk about, we have covered the most significant ones appropriately in this book. These are summarized in Table A.1.
Table A.1. Windows Forms 2.0 Enhancements
Feature | Improvements |
|---|
Forms | Form class enhancements Richer control validation New form project wizards |
Layout | SnapLines layout mode Margin and padding support on all controls and forms for automatic positioning Specialized layout controls for web-style flow and table layout, and splitting Automatic resizing of forms and controls Form and control autoscaling across screen dpi settings |
Drawing | Native support for screen dumping TextRenderer for high-performance text drawing Enhanced automatic and manual double buffering Theme-based custom control drawing helpers |
Printing | Improved printing support across the gamut of printing-specific events, event arguments, enumerations, dialogs, and general printing classes |
Components and Controls | A host of new components and controls: Office 2003-style draggable tool strip control suite (MenuStrip, ToolStrip, StatusStrip, and ContextMenuStrip) MaskedTextBox control (masked text entry) WebBrowser control (enables HTML browsing from Windows Forms applications) SoundPlayer component (playing audio with asynchronous support) Smart tag support on most controls and components for rapid configuration within VS05 Improvements to almost all existing Windows Forms 1. ¥ controls and components based on user feedback
|
Design-Time Integration | Several new design-time attributes Updated support for design-time component initialization Smart tag development capabilities for custom design-time components |
Resources | Ability to either embed or link resources to an application Exposure of application resources via strongly typed wrapper classes Default projectwide resource support for Windows Forms projects Full right-to-left rendering support that can be internationalized |
Applications | A variety of updates to System.Windows.Forms.Application Inclusion of native single-instance support |
Settings | Complete overhaul of the settings system Exposure of settings via strongly typed wrapper classes Rich programmatic support for loading, updating, saving, rolling back, and migrating settings Safe settings persistence (for ClickOnce) VS05 and Windows Forms Designer enhancements Settings persistence to multiple data stores via settings providers |
Data Binding | Unification of heterogeneous data sources via BindingSource Richer design-time configuration DataGridView control with greater binding and UI capabilities BindingNavigator for tool strip-style navigation of data sources Tighter integration with form validation |
Multithreaded User Interfaces | Simplified multithreading via the BackgroundWorker component Improved support for asynchronous invocation of web services methods |
ClickOnce Deployment | Automatic publishing, delivery, and installation Tight VS05 integration and configuration Trustworthy deployment Support for smart clients |