I seem to spend a large portion of my event-handling time in WinForms learning about its events through experimentation and trial-and-error.
For example, the definition of the Control.Resize event (from MSDN’s .NET 4.0 – Control.Resize Event page):
“Occurs when the control is resized.”
As it turns out, ‘resize’ appears to have a rather specific definition in WinForms parlance. The event is not fired whenever the control changes size (for that, you have to listen to the SizeChanged event).
This isn’t immediately obvious from the MSDN documentation, and fumbling my way through these events and ‘special definitions’ results in a lot of wasted time and unexpected behavior. Is there a central repository for an exhaustive definition of WinForms events (when they fire, when they don’t fire but you might expect they would, firing order, etc)?
I think MSDN is the closest to a reference you will come, unfortunately the exact info is a bit scattered.
Perhaps reading a good book on the subject will provide you with enough background knowledge on WinForms, to be able to find the right definitions and references quicker / or understand the quirks. A good one might be Petzold’s Programming Microsoft Windows Forms. It might be a bit old, but nothing really new has happened in WinForms since it came out. The reason why I am suggesting this one, is that Petzold is the author of Programming Windows, which is the C/Win32 API counterpart, and this one is generally regarded as the book for Windows programmers.