Newbie asking: which book to learn Windows Forms with C++? Switch to C#?

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Dear members,

I've just started playing with Windows Forms with C++, but being a newbie in both worlds I am thinking of reading some material before wasting too much time.
I came accross two sources:
- Charles Petzold's book on WF
- Matthew MacDonald's book on User Interfaces in C# and WF
My question: would I be well served by these books? Just one of them? Any other option?

A side question: should I put aside C++ and focus on C#, since most of the books covers it for WF?

Thanks,
Julio de Melo

Posted 29-Jul-10 10:15am

jcdmelo

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Richard MacCutchan · Answer 1 · 2010-07-29T10:38:00

As someone whose main experience is in C/C++ I would say that if you are new then switch to C#. C++.NET is far more difficult than C# and if you are planning to focus on Windows Forms then C# will be much more useful in the long term, especially if you decide to move on to WPF, Silverlight or ASP.NET.

Christian Graus · Answer 2 · 2010-07-29T10:46:00

I agree - C++/CLI is an afterthought and a bit of a joke. Learn C# to learn .NET. Be careful tho, a lot of C# LOOKS like C++, but behaves very differently, especially as it pertains to memory management. The biggest gotcha IMO is that there's no deterministic destruction, and the GC is useless for memory management. Any object about to go out of scope that has a Dispose method, you need to call it, to stop memory leaks.

I would suggest at this point in time, you may want to learn WPF instead of winforms.

jcdmelo · Answer 3 · 2010-07-30T00:28:00

Dear Richard and Christian,

Thank you both for your suggestions. Coming from experts like you they had such an impact that yesterday I signed the Full E-Reference Library from MSDN, where I started to read some material about C# and WPF, besides adding VCEE C# 2010 to my VCEE C++ installation.

It seemed to me like a good move, for having access to such a large source of information. And it was a sweet deal too: I paid just $100 for a 1-year subscription, a hefty discount of $149 from the US price.

Newbie asking: which book to learn Windows Forms with C++? Switch to C#?

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