How would you implement MVC in a Windows Forms application?

Question

I don\'t develop too many desktop / Windows Forms applications, but it had occurred to me that there may be some benefit to using the MVC (Model View Controller) pattern for

Answer 1

Well, actually Windows Forms implements a "free-style" version of MVC, much like some movies implement some crappy "free-style" interpretation of some classic books (Romeo & Juliet come to mind).

I'm not saying Windows Forms' implementation is bad, it's just... different.

If you use Windows Forms and proper OOP techniques, and maybe an ORM like EntitySpaces for your database access, then you could say that:

1. The ORM/OOP infrastructure is the Model
2. The Forms are the Views
3. The event handlers are the Controller

Although having both View and Controller represented by the same object make separating code from representation way more difficult (there's no easy way to plug-in a "GTK+ view" in a class derived from Microsoft.Windows.Forms.Form).

What you can do, if you are careful enough. Is keep your form code completely separate from your controller/model code by only writing GUI related stuff in the event handlers, and all other business logic in a separate class. In that case, if you ever wanted to use GTK+ to write another View layer, you would only need to rewrite the GUI code.