Chapter 17: Enhancing Windows Forms

• Adding Toolbars
• Using the Clipboard
• Working with Drag and Drop

This chapter concludes our tour of Windows Forms. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to enhance your Windows Forms applications by adding common functionality such as toolbars, clipboard support, and drag and drop capability. These features will improve the productiveness of your applications by providing shortcuts to frequently used functionality and by enabling reuse of existing data from other applications.

Most of the applications that you use every day use toolbars. Toolbars provide shortcuts to functionality hidden in menus; a toolbar can be especially handy for users who don’t remember shortcut keys or who prefer pointing and clicking to typing. To be useful, your toolbars should be clearly structured and expose only regularly used functionality.

The clipboard and drag and drop capability also help the user to be more productive with your applications. With these features, users can easily copy data into an application or export data out of an application. Drag and drop even allows users to move data from one application to another or to link data. To make your applications truly successful, clipboard and drag-and-drop support should be included.