This book was written for programmers and web developers who want to build desktop applications using Microsoft's powerful new .NET platform. Many readers will have experience with the Microsoft Foundation Classes or writing to the Windows API, but they may find that while the Windows Forms applications accomplish the same tasks, the approach is often quite different.

It might be helpful to first read a primer on C# or VB.NET (see Jesse Liberty's Programming C# (O'Reilly) or Programming Visual Basic .NET (O'Reilly)), but this is not required. Experienced VB, Java, or C++ developers may decide that they can pick up what they need to know about the languages just by working through the exercises in this book.