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Building a Simple Windows Forms Application

(IDE-Free)

As you would expect, modern .NET IDEs (such as Visual Studio 2008, C# 2008 Express, or

SharpDevelop) provide numerous form designers, visual editors, and integrated code generation

tools (aka wizards) to facilitate the construction of a Windows Forms application. While these tools

are extremely useful, they can also hinder the process of learning Windows Forms, as these same

tools tend to generate a good deal of boilerplate code that can obscure the core object model.

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Given this, our first Windows Forms example will be created using a no-frills text editor and the C#

command-line compiler (see Chapter 2 for the details of working with csc.exe).

To begin, create a folder named SimpleWinFormsApp (I’d suggest creating this directly off your

C drive), open a Visual Studio 2008 command prompt, and using your text editor of choice, create a

file named SimpleWFApp.cs. Author the following code within your new file, and save it in the

SimpleWinFormsApp folder.