The Windows Forms toolkit has fewer features than Swing and can be more difficult to use but does have the advantage of producing applications that cannot be distinguished from native programs, something that can be difficult to do in a Java application. The GDI+ library allows for complex 2D operations, providing functionality similar to that of the Java 2D library.

Overall, graphics and UI programming with .NET follows a model similar to that for Java, but there is a good deal of opportunity for third-party developers to fill out the feature set with advanced components.