Best way to break up large forms...

[Steven Klug]

Greetings,

I'm new to forms programming, but am considering using it for the
basis of a large GUI development effort. One question that I can't
seem to find an answer to anywhere is how do you break up code that's
generated by the designer? Our GUI will likely be made up of a lot of
panes using splitters, with not many modal dialogs. It would seem
that the designer wants to put all the code for these into one big
file.

I see that you can make user control libraries, and that might be a
way to go, but I guess what I was looking for was something more akin
to the old MFC days when a property page could be made into a class
and put in it's own file, thereby breaking up the code so that
multiple developers could be working on the GUI simultaneously. How
have other people solved this issue? It may be that developing a
better framework for the GUI with looser coupling and reusable
comonents in a library is the way to go, but that's a little much for
doing rapid prototyping.

Thanks,

Steve

 

[Justin Rogers]

UserControl's are pretty much your only option with your business
requirements as stated. They will allow a designer to work on a specific
view while other designers can easily work on separate and distinct views.

You have your Form designer and your UserControl designer. So with
rapid prototyping in mind, those are your logical modular points.