My question has two parts:
Does anyone have any tips or references to some documentation on the web about how to write GUI code that is easy to read, write, and maintain?
Example.
I find that the more extensive my GUI forms become, I end up with a long list of fairly short event handler methods. If I try to add any private helper methods, they just get lost in the shuffle, and I constantly have to scroll around the page to follow a single line of thought.
How can I easily manage settings across the application?
Example.
If the user selects a new item in a drop-down list, I might need to enable some components on the GUI, update an app config file, and store the new value in a local variable for later. I usually opt to not create event handlers for all the settings (see above), and end up with methods like "LoadGUISettings" and "SaveGUISettings", but then I end up calling these methods all over my code, and it runs through a lot of code just to update very few, if any, actual changes.
Thanks!
If you're using WPF, you might want to read the Composite Application Guideance for WPF.
It discusses many of these topics (as well as many others). The main goal of that guideance is to make large scale applications in a flexible, maintainable manner.