C# Forms

The C# forms editor is superb. You can design very complex interfaces with little or no coding. The designer was designed to be the best forms designer ever, and I think it is a success in that.

Try writing some small graphical applications with VS.net and C#. You will understand what I mean.

I can imagine and I agree an editor(especially VS-type) should be very promising(im getting vs .net 2003 from my uni at the moment) but Im wondering wether its smart to not use it in order to get experience coding the forms.
I mean in the business world will that be needed or will most companies have vs .net?

Is c# made in conjunction with visual studio or are there many environments?

-CProgrammer

I see absolutely no reason not to use the builtin GUI editor... and yes, when I work I use it too ;-)

Apart from some geeky "i do everything by hand" thoughts or the need to have the controls created dynamically depending on data that is only available at runtime, I can not imagine any reason to type all that GUI stuff by hand...

Except when I dynamically build interfaces, I always use the form designer: it's so much easier. If you use the 2005 version it's even better: all the generated code is put in a seperate file, it isn't mixed with yours anymore.

I can see no reason why one would write the code by hand instead of generating it with the form designer.

Of course, it's another story if you use tools like MyXAML.

Thanks guys for the answers.
Oh as you mentioned Visual Studio .net 2005. Are there significant differences to 2003 apart from what you mentioned?

-CProgrammer

Generally a business is going to go with what produces decent results in the least amount of time. Laying out forms by hand isn't a great use of time. ;)

Quote:

Original post by CProgrammer Is c# made in conjunction with visual studio or are there many environments?

There are other environments, for example:
Borland's C# Builder (free for non commercial developpement)
#Develop (free and open-source)
Both include a form designer.

Quote:

Oh as you mentioned Visual Studio .net 2005. Are there significant differences to 2003 apart from what you mentioned?

Yes, there are. I am using the Visual C# Express beta. It's smaller than the full VS. Some improvements in the IDE: intellisense is a lot better (well, you won't mind much if you use WholeTomato VisualAssist anyway. But personnally. now that I have 2005, I don't use it anymore.) There also is a new code snippet expansion functionnality.
But what I really like are the new functionnalities of C# 2.0 and .NET 2.0 (both used by the 2005 beta). There are LOTS of improvements that I'm addicted to.

I suggest you to jump in, the C# express beta is freely available there:
http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/express/

Kind regards,
jods

Try to get the latest MSDN as well. You'll learn about C# and Windows Forms in no time with the help of Dynamic Help.

The reason im asking about vs .net 2005 is that I now have a copy of vs .net 2003. The thing is Im new to c# programming and was wondering wether im wasting my time with 2003(is 2005 so fundamentally different that learning 2003' c# would be learning forgotten stuff).

-CProgrammer

No, you aren't loosing your time with 2003. Everything you will learn with it will still be valuable in 2005. There are no fundamental differences.

The differences are superficial:
- you can achieve many common tasks more easily with 2005.
- there are a bunch of new concepts, but they don't replace old ones, they just open new possibilities (Generics, Iterators, Anonymous Delegates, ...)

Generally speaking, no matter which language you learn, you'll always learn something valuable. (I recently learnt several valuable things by working with Oberon-2, and I already knew Smalltalk, Java, C, C++, C#, x86 asm, Ada, Perl, Delphi. So you see, there's always something new to learn.)