Man, i'm knackered and stumped at the same time .

You know I have spent the last 3 months working on my dream project and finally got my head around OOP and design patterns (Well when is enough a enough eh?), anyway, I have designed my classes, favoured composition instead of inheritence and basically ready to start looking at the design of my GUI for the application.

I utimately want to make my application look like Outlook, I want flashing lights (Well what is Vegas without it's lights!), menus to appear and disappear, views to be grids and then maybe thumbnail lists with the switch of a button, dynamic controls appearing and disappearing. What I am thinking is should the GUI be built using design patterns as well? I am wondering what is the best way to design a GUI which can dynamically change depending on rules?

What do you do: -

a) Just build the GUI visually by throwing all the controls on the form and then wire things up in the code behind.

b) Build the GUI using user controls and wire them up through classes and code behind.

c) Use the Model-View pattern.

I would love to hear and LEARN from you all; maybe you can recommend a book or some articles on the best way to architect GUI's. I think this is the last piece in the chain and i'm reluctant to start coding until I have covered all bases.

Geoff.

You definately want to use the M-V-C pattern. It decouples the system nicley.

Joe Hummel is doing an MSDN web cast series on exactally this topic. I think it talks to exactally the question you asked. Let me see if I can find a link to it... Hmm... Looking...

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/modernsoftdev.mspx

I really enjoy Joe's web casts. He is really good at explaining these concept and sometimes abstract ideas.

This webcast is specifically about architecture and patterns and all that good stuff.

BOb

Bob's got a good referance...you must check it out. I also suggest that you look in to the UIP application blocks that MS publish.

I utimately want to make my application look like Outlook

If you are looking to build web application I recommend looking into using AJAX - every tried Outlook Web Access? You will be impressed with the glitzy 'lights' in OWA.

pilotboba wrote:

Joe Hummel is doing an MSDN web cast series on exactally this topic. I think it talks to exactally the question you asked.

You know, I had completely forgot about this MSDN series, I knew it was running so i'll check it out, thanks Bob.

Geoff.

sparmar2000 wrote:

Bob's got a good referance...you must check it out. I also suggest that you look in to the UIP application blocks that MS publish.

Thanks for the heads up... I know the patterns and practices guys have also developed the Composite pattern for VS2005 to do the same thing.

Geoff.