c# Winforms MVC

Question

I have never used MVC before and would like some advice.

I have actually already written quite a bit of code, but looking at it, it seems to be quite highly coupled between classes and there is a lot of code written on the actual main form of the winform. I am a University student, recently started on a 12 month placement, so do not have much real world experience.

My system is effectively a WinForm GUI that has, amongst other things, a treeview that is popualted at load via an event. And then when the user clicks on a node, it gets a datagridview from a dllplugin (which obtains the data from an Oracle DB via a perl script.

My question, is would MVC apply in this circumstance, and would anybody have any good advice/resources on how I can now, post-design to implement it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The MVP pattern is more adapted to WinForms applications. Here's a nice article you may take a look at.

Answer 2

Received wisdom is that MVC is good for the web but has some constraints when operating in a desktop environment (I'm not sufficiently experienced in applying this sort of pattern in either context to make a worthwhile judgement).

The pattern that Microsoft (for one) are pushing for forms use is MVVM - which is Model View View Model - and it provides a similar set of benefits in terms of separation and testability. Even allowing that I could wish I knew more I can see what and why, especially if you're looking at WPF (and Silverlight) but in any context where you're trying to ensure separation.

Answer 3

The MVC pattern can work well with WinForms, see this question .

There are lot of related pattern to choose from; in the case of WinForms (unlike WPF) there is no clear winner.

Partly this is due to everyone having different aims, do you care most about:

• Code reuse between Forms in the UI
• Being able to support form the one UI system
• Easy unit testing
• Etc