Hard and soft
Function pointers are among the most powerful tools in C, but are a bit of a pain during the initial stages of learning. This article demonstrates the basics of function pointers, and how to use them to implement function callbacks in C. C++ takes a slightly different route for callbacks, which is another journey altogether.
Using Windows.Forms gets really ugly when you need to access the user interface from multiple threads. IMHO, this is an example of leaky abstraction.
When you run a program with this UI threading issue from within Visual Studio, it will always throw an exception. The same program running as a standalone EXE may not throw the exception. That is to say, the development environment is stricter than the .NET framework.