.NET Desktop Applications

If you are looking for providing disconnected or offline capabilities or rich user interaction, or even integration with the user interfaces of other applications using Microsoft .NET technologies, e-Zest suggests one of the following architecture alternatives depending on your specific requirements.

• “Full-blown” desktop/tablet PC user interfaces built with Windows Forms

Building a Windows-based application involves building an application with Windows Forms and controls where application provides all or most of the data rendering functionality. This gives you a great deal of control over the user experience and total control over the look and feel of the application.

• Embedded HTML

You can choose to implement the entire user interface using Windows Forms, or you can use additional embedded HTML in your Windows-based applications. Embedded HTML allows for greater run-time flexibility (because the HTML may be loaded from external resources or even a database in connected scenarios) and user customization.

• Application plug-ins

Use cases may suggest that the user interface of your application could be better implemented as a plug-in for other applications, such as Microsoft Office, AutoCAD, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, engineering tools, and so on. In this case, we can leverage all of the data acquisition and display logic of the host application and provide only the code to gather the data and work with your business logic.

When creating a Windows Forms-based application, e-Zest follows following application architecture guidelines:

• We rely on data binding to keep data synchronized across multiple forms that are open simultaneously. This alleviates the need to write complex data synchronization code.
• We avoid hard-coding relationships between forms, and rely on the user process component to open them and synchronize data and events. This makes user interface elements more reusable.
• We implement error handlers in forms. Doing so prevents the user from seeing an unfriendly .NET exception window and having the application fail if you have not handled exceptions elsewhere.
• We validate user input in the user interface. Validation occurs at the stages in the user’s task or process that allow point-in-time validations. In some cases, we can proactively enable and disable controls and visually cue the user when invalid data is entered. Validating user input in the user interface prevents unnecessary round trips to server-side components when invalid data has been entered.
• If we are creating custom user controls, we expose only the public properties and methods that we actually need. This makes the components more maintainable.

e-Zest has a large and growing team of Microsoft certified professionals with rich experience of developing cost effective and quality solutions using .NET based desktop and smart-client application architecture.