Programming Microsoft Windows Forms, by Charles Petzold, is a great book for programmers that want to learn about the cool new stuff in Windows Forms 2.0, but are already familiar with Windows development using the .NET Framework and C#. If you’re a complete newbie, you might want to start with the prequel to this book, the 1,200 page Programming Windows with C#, also by Petzold.

One of the best parts about this book is that it hardly talks about Visual Studio – it really is important to understand these libraries before you can effectively use the leaky abstractions of the Visual Studio designers.

The coolest new features of Windows Forms 2.0 are the dynamic layout features – automatic sizing, auto scaling, anchoring, docking, flow layout, table layout, etc. This book describes them nicely.

The descriptions of the controls were interesting, if brief, and without enough screenshots. I learned something about the LinkLabel control – I always assumed it implemented a label whose entire content had to be a single link, but it actually supports multiple links and text wrapping.

The ControlExplorer application is fun – you can install it via ClickOnce from http://www.charlespetzold.com/winforms/index.html. It allows you to play with all of the controls available with Windows Forms 2.0.

I also enjoyed reading about data binding. It isn’t as well done as the data binding support in WPF, but it looks usable.

In any case, if you are planning on writing a Windows Forms application with C# 2.0 any time soon, I recommend that you pick up this book.