Announcing Windows Forms Best Practices

Those of you following my blog will know that I’ve been working on a course entitled Windows Forms Best Practices for Pluralsight. I’m pleased to announce that it is now live, and you can check out some of my ideas for how to write better Windows Forms applications (as well as how to incrementally migrate away to a newer technology).

The approach I took was to make a small Windows Forms demo application in the style often seen in typical line of business applications – all the code sits inside the code behind of a monolithic main form. And through the course I improve this application in various ways, both from a usability and a maintainability perspective.

Along the way I refactor it towards a Model View Presenter pattern, and improve it in various other ways such as better threading and exception handling, making it resizable and localizable.

One regret I do have is that there simply wasn’t time to show how the code could be refactored completely to MVP – I just did the first step. I have however since continued the refactoring and have a version of the demo application that uses MVP more extensively. I’ll try to make this available for viewers of my course, so do get in touch (@mark_heath on Twitter) if you’d like to get hold of this.

The course is available for viewing here. Hope you find it helpful.