Hi,
I am in the process of designing a .net windows forms application that uses metadata to drive the UI. Apart from finding http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms954610.aspx, I have nothing much to look forward to. Anyone here worked on metadata driven User interfaces? What are the implications of following this methodology and any pointers would be greatly helpful.
The most obvious answer would be that Microsoft have themselves embraced this concept through their use of Xaml in Windows Presentation Foundation which replaces WinForms (to an extent).
If you want to stick to a WinForms, you may want to consider MyXaml which is kind of a homage to Xaml for WinForms!
You may want to check out Evolutility CRUD framework. It is an open source metadata driven framework for CRUD generating all UI at run-time.
It comes w/ source code (in C# and JS) and many samples.
You may try this with HTA. Sometime back I created a metadata driven application using HTA and XML. I created XAML like structure and HTA-VBScript code to parse this structure and render diffent types of UI elements along with validations.
Check the Andromeda project out, which does so extensively. Too bad the stack isn´t .NET friendly (PHP, Postgres, Perl).
I have been looking for something similar. Beth Massi has a few articles on this matter, but it is for WPF http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc947916.aspx I also ran into Evolutility here http://www.codeproject.com/KB/codegen/Metamodel_for_CRUD.aspx I am going to look at those two and see if I can replicate the logic for Windows forms. If anyone knows of other tools/articles please chime in.