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c#wpfwinformsprismcomposition

What technology to use to write a modular C# desktop program?

Question:

Is there some effective way to hide some portions of the WinForm/WPF desktop program based on user settings/permissions?

Why I need this?

I'm starting a big accounting project which will contain hundreds of forms/dialogs.

The program is going to launch a main window which shows 1 to 4 divisions. The user selects each of those and it will then launch the a window which contains a sidebar with a bunch of buttons on sidebar (something like Microsoft Outlook). Now, when the user clicks on each of these buttons, it will open that section of the program and the user will work with that part. Based on the user permissions/settings, there's a need to sometimes hide some of these buttons though. For instance suppose I have 4 main divisions A, B, C and D. When you launch A, you'll get a sidebar containing A1, A2, ..., A100. A user might opt to see only A1 & A50!

Our initial approach was to use WinForms for this because the team was very familiar with it. I suspect that for doing so, we have to build some sort of model which contains information about user preferences and write lines of code like btnA1.Visible = false; a lot.

Frankly just thinking about doing that disgusts me. That's why I'm looking for a better way to achieve such result. I've searched around and found PRISM.

I'm not sure just yet but I think to use PRISM I need to make each of those buttons or their dialog a module and load them after I decide which of them is needed for the user.

It seems like a nice way to do this but considering the fact that this project is very urgent and we don't need to load different modules for different users (we just need to load them - ideally on demand - and sometimes hide some), I have some concerns:

  1. My team might need some time to learn WPF
  2. All of us don't know much about Unity and PRISM.
  3. This might be overly complex, i.e. there might be a more simple way to achieve this without going into such lengths.

Also, I'm watching Prism & Silverlight Series and PRISM5 for WPF from Channel9.

Solution

  • a window which contains a sidebar with a bunch of buttons on sidebar (something like Microsoft Outlook). Now, when the user clicks on each of these buttons, it will open that section of the program and the user will work with that part.

    That sounds to me like a TabControl. You'd rather not try to reinvent the wheel as it's already been invented.

    The only difference between that example and your requirement is that instead of hard coding the tabs you're going to bind to a collection of ViewModels, like this, and then have each instance of TabViewModel toggle it's own IsVisible property depending on user permissions / user selections.

    Simple as that. No need for complex MVVM frameworks. No need for silly obsolete useless winforms stuff.