WinForms - what are these?

It may sound strange but I 开发者_JS百科have not found any simple introduction to WinForms (theory, I do know how to work with the forms). On MSDN I read that a form is a basic element of an application, but I would like to know what the winforms generally are. According to the wiki, it's an API. Is there anything on MSDN that I am missing?

Windows Forms was the main API for .NET used to develop graphical user interfaces, prior to WPF and Silverlight.

It's based on the traditional Windows API, wrapped into a clean .NET interface. Each "Control" is basically a wrapper around native, Windows API controls, and made much easier to use.

This has been supplanted by WPF and Silverlight now, though, so if you're just starting out, you might want to consider focusing on them instead.

Check out http://cplus.about.com/od/learnc/ss/random.htm .

WinForm (Short for Windows Form Application) is an app type for creating standalone application. That do not require any support other than the runtime and OS. Since we generally have two types of application , one is Web and another is Windows, so its a developer context that for web they made web form and for win they made win form. WinForm is not an api, but u have to use Win API to work on that.