Ways to implement large settings dialog with WPF and MVVM

Question

I am building an extensible WPF + MVVM application that will possibly have a significant number of user settings (from both core of the application and plugins). From my previous experience I can tell that managing options dialogs is pain when the application grows. Are there any best practices or design patterns that I could follow? How other applications like Visual Studio implement options dialogs with large number of categories and settings? Are these dialogs generated at runtime?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I have had a similar issue in the past, and went for the PropertyGrid in the Extended WPF Toolkit .

This lets you bind the grid to an object, containing all of your configurable properties and will auto-populate the grid based on those properties. You can provide templates for custom editors too.

Answer 2

从包含很少项目的对话框开始，因此稍后更容易添加更多项目，而不需要用户搜索更改的位置（甚至在其他分割的对话框中找到它）。