Can a Visual Basic (.NET / 2010) file be split up for readability?

Question

I'm writing a program in Visual Basic 2010. It's a HMI (Human-Machine Interface) and therefore has a whole whack of buttons that just send commands to other devices. As a result, there are a huge pile of event handlers for clicking buttons that can't really be broken down into modules (unless my understanding of modules is wrong).

Essentially, I'd like to be able to move all the event handlers, for, say, button presses to a different file. Can this be done or is it important that they stay in "MainWindow.xaml.vb"? (All my buttons reside in one fullscreen window, some are hidden by tabs).

Thanks,

--Erik T

Answer 1

Sure use partial class. Check this article,

http://visualbasic.about.com/od/usingvbnet/a/partclses.htm

Answer 2

You can use Partial Classes to split these into separate files, if required.

Answer 3

You can use Partial Classes to break up your class definition into multiple files which might help organize your code.

The link above will help explain exactly how to use Partial Classes. The following link will show you the VB.NET Syntax (and how to use Class Designer to split things up):

How to: Split a Class into Partial Classes

Answer 4

I like to use regions to hide code (the code highlighter dose not do this kinda thing so ill use an image)

Keep in mind that this is only hiding the code in VS the file is still compleatly intact and the compiler will just ignore the #Region and #End Region lines

Answer 5

Could you separate some of the functionality into custom controls instead? Possibly even create the buttons on the fly based on some external data?

Answer 6

For the modularity of the UI, you could explore the composition capacities of WPF/SL described here and with helpers and examples here . But it`s a really different architecture, and might be a major refactoring if you already have a lot of code.

For the buttons, you should be able to use commanding that should hide most of your event handlers. Read about commanding here.