UC(User component) concept in Win32/.NET Win forms.

Question

Couple of year ago I when to work for company as web developer. It has my first Sirius web development job, (ASPx/C#) so it has very exciting and I learned a lot about that world, from the developer point of view.

In that group we had a concept for the pages where loaded in the page UC’s (User controls), I don’t know if it’s the same in every web development team with every language, I’ll assume it is so.

The contract ended and I came back to develop win32 “winForm” application.

But since them I have tried to apply the same principle for my win32 development I learn there, meaning having bunch of UC’s (Visual User controls) that I load in the form. They are regular visual components, not loaded in the toolbox, code is available in the project, but the component is not developed in the form, they are loaded there.

I would like to know opinions about this approach, what other are doing similar or better to this And improvements that can help us to speed up development and increase code reuse, because that is what this is all about.

Answer 1

If you're using the layout components in Winforms, this might be an acceptable approach although I think the thing that distinguishes the web and Windows Forms (note: NOT WPF!) is that in the former you do a lot of "compositing" which is why the UserControl concept is so useful whereas in the latter you operate on very sophisticated controls (e.g. 3rd party - in my last gig we used an incredible grid control via a small company called Infralution)

The main problem I would see is with layouts since the rendering model is a little different than the web. I know nothing about your application but if it "works" that is what is most important. I assume in this case you use things like the FlowLayoutPanel and the TableLayoutPanel properly.

If you want to go a more canonical route, take a look beyond simply creating components at how you can use the inheritance model to composite your application in a more robust way - having a base Form class that has containers for where your "UserControl" type components go and then using some kind of interface based dependency injection to swap them out while the application is running.

Finally, take a look at some of the open source Windows Forms applications out there to see if you're being too hard on yourself since common UI and reusable components are a goal in every application. Even though I've always thought Microsoft's Patterns & Practices stuff teetered towards being bloated, there are some good ideas and you should study some of the approaches of the Composite UI Application Block they put out.

Okay, not finally, there's one more thing I'd like to add: take a long hard look at WPF which will bring back a lot of the concepts from your web development days and give you that kind of power in a desktop application.