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Developing a new user interface for legacy WinForms MDI application

I am working on moving a client / server application created using C # and WinForms into the SOA / WPF / Silverlight world. One of the biggest hurdles is the user interface design. My current user interface is controlled by MDI, and users are heavily dependent on child windows, having many open at the same time and switching between them.

What could be the best way to recreate user interface functionality in an environment without MDI? (I have no desire to create MDI functions myself in WPF). Tabs? A list pane that toggles various controls?

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4 answers

Check out 37signals and how good their web interfaces are (mostly HTML + AJAX). This is a good example of web applications that work. One of the things to remember is to make sure that you are not breaking the web paradigm. If users want to see two things side by side, they should be able to duplicate the window and let the web browser do the windows.

There are many new visualization paradigms for WPF. You can find several examples on the sites for various suppliers of management tools: Xceed , Telerik , Infragistics . They have demos for different ways to help you organize screens in the app.

When developing complex composite applications in WPF, you can also get started with the site

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I think that the answer will really be in your interests - I would create several prototypes with several paradigms and give them the opportunity to make a certain contribution. The last thing you want to do is introduce a new user interface paradigm without entering an end user.

The tabs are really popular at present, but do not allow you to view side by side, so if this is a requirement, you may want to go with a larger Outlook-style setting, with several panels that can be activated, hidden and resized.

One thing you might want to do is encode your application as a composite interface, where each view is created regardless of its container (whether it be a child window, tab or accordion, etc.) and is simply “dropped” into This will protect you from when users change their minds about the navigation paradigm in the future.

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multiple top-level windows are easy to deploy and have all the benefits of MDI - what MS has chosen for newer versions of Office

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Have you tried GOA WinForms ?

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/1276601/

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