3 WinForms Setup Tasks You Should Do Right Away in 10 Minutes or Less

When you first create a Windows Forms project, there are a few things I recommend you do. For example, I recommend changing the default font size since it starts out as 9 point. Waiting to change that will actually have negative implications for your project, which I will show you. In this 10-minute training video, we will go through the first few tweaks I recommend you make to any WinForms project.
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[@gahshunker]

Great! We are ready for the postman winform episode #2 :)

[@IAmTimCorey]

Monday!

[@waynehawkins654]

@@IAmTimCorey How many episode will be for this postman app?

[@IAmTimCorey]

Right now, I'm planning about 12 but I'm also expecting to add more features as we go. The app will be working by about lesson #4, though.

[@bhanuchhabra7634]

One piece of advice, as soon as you add a new control, rename all you want then change the events and such, 2nd use anchors as soon you add a new control, it will save your life later. What are anchors: anchors are references for your controls, these are the reference point where you controls would stick to in case you maximize or change the size of your forms, for example ok and cancel button on bottom right 10px etc

[@IAmTimCorey]

Thanks for sharing!

[@IBNEKAYESH]

Most of the legacy systems still running and development ongoing in WinForms.

[@IAmTimCorey]

Correct.

[@bhanuchhabra7634]

Very true very true, probably even for the next couple of years if not another decade 😀. not all companies and not all winForms apps can move to other platforms, not even WPF not even to Web.

[@IBNEKAYESH]

@@bhanuchhabra7634 yes, Mostly all the transactional apps like out, internal invoices, accounts entries, TAX and VAT entries those transactions are very handy for end users, so the framework is WinForms, and that's why old and new development continue in it.

[@S3Kglitches]

Folder structure by component types or by use cases? Endless fight in my mind :)

[@abto6914]

Same fight😂, I think it is a personal prefrence tho

[@IAmTimCorey]

Whichever works better for your process.

[@mohdotnet]

Thanks Tim, great winform tips. ❤

[@IAmTimCorey]

You are welcome.

[@andergarcia1115]

Master, I'm following your steps to learn WinForms because I believe, as you say, that it's a user interface type that remains in use. thank you for your valuable advice and recommendations.

[@IAmTimCorey]

You are welcome.

[@S3Kglitches]

Too bad they still did not add search bar to Properties window in vanilla WinForms designer.

[@IAmTimCorey]

I think the feeling there is that there aren't enough properties to warrant another thing taking away screen real estate in VS.

[@lor0the0fallen0angel]

Font size: Good to know. Form naming: i miself forgetting it almost every time :-) Folder structure: worth considering, thanks for the tip.

[@IAmTimCorey]

You are welcome.

[@S3Kglitches]

Have you also experienced less reliability and more bugs in basic C# editor in Visual Studio since 17.8 and 17.9 when probably Maddy Montaquilla from MAUI was placed in VS management?

[@IAmTimCorey]

Maddy is working on MAUI tooling (mainly VS Code), so I don't think there is any causation here. As for reliability issues, no, not really. There are always bugs but it has been rather stable for me. Also, if you are saying "since 17.9" then I'm not sure what you mean unless you are using pre-release versions of Visual Studio. The current version is 17.9.5.

[@Mr.Joedara]

Good morning/afternoon/vening to you Tim, Im just asking if there isan alternative ways you know to create an installer of a solutionn with two projects on it except squirrel :)

[@IAmTimCorey]

You can check out Wix or any other application that creates MSI files for alternatives.

[@Mr.Joedara]

@@IAmTimCorey Hi, I already finished my app deployment base on this tutorial. Thank you for that! I already upload my release file on my github repo also but the problem is, when i download the .exe or .msi. It says taht it might have a virus. I know that it hasnt but how do we remove that?

[@IAmTimCorey]

You probably need to digitally sign the file. That can be expensive still, but Azure has a system for doing so that is in preview right now. I forget the name, but it is for creating developer certificates for digitally signing applications.

[@Mr.Joedara]

@@IAmTimCorey thanks

[@EnglishBob70]

Love these videos! WinForms just won't die, will it? It's been a while since I've done anything using WinForms. Does anyone know how well it handles different DPI and resolution settings? e.g. will it it look about the same on a 4K display as it would on something more modest (lower DPI)? Lots of apps tend to look really bad at high DPI. Any plans to do a course on more modern UI frameworks, e.g. WinUI? I was asked to write something in WinUI reasonably recently and, without any experience of its forerunners (WPF, UWP), it was an absolute nightmare to get started. The documentation is seriously lacking, and any sort of training materials are few and far between. It's almost as if Microsoft don't want it to succeed.

[@TisSaxInit]

I am not sure why my comment mentioning another way to change default font for the whole project was removed Tim?

[@IAmTimCorey]

I'm not sure either. I didn't remove anything. KZbin may have screened it because of a link or what it thought was bad language.

[@Cornelis1983]

Initial name Form1 could initially also have been the name of the project I guess. Not that beautiful either but at least it is better than Form1.

[@IAmTimCorey]

I think they really wanted to force you into giving it a good name rather than having a "good enough" name.

[@JoshWeeks]

I deal with so much old winforms crap every day.

[@S3Kglitches]

are you sure the whole old system isn't crap? Usually WinForms is enjoyable because it's simple and intuitive. We even chose it for new projects.

[@JoshWeeks]

@@S3Kglitches Not at all. I find WPF a treat compared to WinForms. A nice separation of ui and logic does a lot for sanity.

[@vincentotieno9197]

@@JoshWeeks Forget WPF. .NET MAUI id the way to go now.

[@S3Kglitches]

@miyu545 sometimes there has to be a lot of logic in the UI as well (in addition to logic in the business/application layer). But in some cases it can all be separated into these layers successfully depends on app.

[@JoshWeeks]

@miyu545 Yep and then the ui layer still sucks if you're using WinForms, but that makes it a lot easier to switch to something else :)

[@-martintheengineer-7465]

👌

[@IAmTimCorey]

👍