WPF XAML code-behind management

Question

Hello there... I have wandered into a WPF application project and have made some good progress, but one thing I am finding is that the code-behind page is now getting longer and longer... since there is only one XAML page to the whole application, the code-behind page that really just takes care of the event handlers and programmatically created controls for the design page, is now over 2000 lines. The VS2010 IDE helps in navigating all the methods, etc, but I am wondering if I am missing something as far as organizing all my controls and code-behind. Is there a way to break out some of the UI of the application into multiple XAML pages, so the code-behind will be more compartmentalized to a specific set of controls. Any search I do on multiple XAML file applications in WPF immediately leads me to XBAPS and I am interested in staying with the desktop WPF. Aside from creating regions in the one code-behind, are there any other strategies I can use to organize this code (in separate XAML files)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

At a minimum, separate out parts of your UI into separate UserControls, instead of including it in a single "view" in a single Window.

That being said, separating our your logic and using a pattern like MVVM will make this much cleaner in the long run. It sounds like you're using lots of event handlers - I wrote a blog series designed to help migrate from this style of development to a more MVVM style. It might be worth glancing at for ideas. It describes how WPF allows you to move away from having lots of event handlers by keeping your application logic separated from your UI code.