Software Engineering of GUI Programming?

cucucu asks: "After ten years of programming for the network, I started programming a GUI Desktop application. My problem is most GUI tutorials out there are nothing more than a taxonomy of buttons, dialogs, and check-boxes. So as I checked GUI toolkits, I found that I can easily learn all the widgets, layouts, callbacks, and the like, and start coding a GUI application. However, very soon I found myself repeating code all over the place. Is there a good guide (online or off) for the Software Engineering aspects of GUI programming, so that I can learn how to reuse code, and build my class hierarchies over the one provided by the toolkit?"

Comments

Re:Mono and Gtk# too

[modeless]

Generics, for instance, are a much-needed feature - but Microsoft didn't bother to implement it for ArrayList, the data structure that I use most often.

ArrayList is still its original, non-generic self for compatibility reasons, but the new List<> class is its excellent replacement in the System.Collections.Generic namespace, along with the generic Hashtable replacement, Dictionary<,>. Don't know why they felt the need to change the names, although ArrayList->List was an improvement...

Other than that, I agree. I'd just put events and delegates farther down under the "completely suck" section. They were really botched and it makes certain things a lot harder than they should be. Also, I'd mention the single greatest thing about C#, IMHO its saving grace: C/C++ interop. The design of the interop with legacy code is nothing short of brilliant. It's five minutes work to wrap and call a random C function, no matter if it takes pointers to weird structs or even a callback! And because of that, C# actually stands a chance of displacing C++ as the language of choice for Windows applications.

If only Microsoft had fixed it to allow distributing C# applications with their own stripped-down runtime included, instead of requiring administrative install of the full 20+ MB .NET Framework including ASP.NET and who all knows what crap you don't need, it probably would have replaced C++ for many applications already. Something like perl2exe for C# is what I want. Just bundle the runtime and the JIT and your code up in one nice tidy ready-to-run executable. That would do wonders for the adoption of C#.

Decouple It

[RAMMS EIN]

I didn't see this mentioned in other posts, but I think it's very important:

Decouple your GUI from the code that does the work.

I really don't have a lot of experience with GUI programming, but I do know that there are many different toolkits on different platforms, each comes with its own guidelines, and these guidelines are subject to change over time. At some point down the line, you or someone else is going to want to change the GUI, while keeping the functionality. Moreover, you or someone else may want to drive the application from a script, or from the command line (some platforms may even require one or the other for applications that are considered good citizens). In other words, your application _is_ going to have more than one interface - make sure that is easy to accomplish.