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Chapter 16: Rounding Out Our Application, Part 2— Adding a Graphical User Interface

Overview

In Chapter 15, we greatly improved the usefulness of the SRS application by providing a means for persisting the state of Student objects—in particular, their enrollment status in various classes—from one SRS invocation to the next. However, we still haven't provided a means by which a student user can interact with the SRS. As it's currently implemented, we launch the application from the command line by running the SRS executable, and from then on the application runs to completion without any further user input, relying solely on ASCII files and/or hard-coded information as its "fuel" (data).

In this chapter, we're going to enhance our latest version of the SRS application once again by retrofitting a graphical user interface (GUI) front-end. With the GUI that we add, we'll provide hypothetical student users with the capability to

In this chapter, you'll learn

Note?/td>

It's important to remember when reading this chapter that it's only meant to provide an introduction to C# GUIs. Our goal is to teach you how to create a simple, yet completely functional, GUI front-end for our SRS application. With this goal in mind, we're only going to cover that subset of available GUI classes that we'll need for building the SRS; furthermore, we'll only cover those features of these classes that we'll be taking advantage of in building the SRS. Nonetheless, you'll gain valuable insights into the fundamentals of C# GUI building and event handling.

After you've finished reading this chapter and mastering the basics of C# GUI development, we suggest that you pay a visit to the .NET Framework SDK documentation and look specifically at the contents of the GUI-related namespaces.


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