I searched for a similar question, but haven't seen anyone ask this before.
I've been a web developer for a few years now and have never touched windows forms. However, I am taking a job that deals almost exclusively with windows forms.
What tips do you have for someone making such a move? Any resources you can share?
Thanks!
Forms development offers some very different challenges, but your basic skills are transferable.
Layout is very different - the flow & style layout of the web transfers well if you're in WPF, but Forms are much more static. It's very easy to create a functional app with grey boxes and buttons in Windows Forms, much harder to make something more fluid.
However, ASP.Net WebForms is trying to emulate Windows Forms, so event subscriptions and the like are much easier. You'll never have to deal with page life cycle issues or similar.
I reckon going the other way (desktop to web) is much harder.
It is a little weird that you're taking a job developing Windows.Forms without any experience but never mind.
But you're in luck, the classic ASP.NET web development model (with its rich page state and concept of controls with server-side events) is very similar to the windows forms GUI development model.
Also Microsoft being a good software development company to develop for has a plethora of documentation, tutorials and videos available on there windows GUI portal:
There was an article on CodeProject that talks about unifying Web Forms and Windows Forms as shown here. It was essentially designed to be flexible to share the same form layout regardless of Windows / Web. The second part is here that covers asynchronous/synchronous events employed by unifying WinForms and WebForms.
Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.