Planning the User Interface

Before you embark on the design process in Visual Studio, it is probably a decent idea to first draft a mock-up of the form’s general landscape. This can be a simple pen and paper sketch; what we are looking for is a simple, rough blueprint for the application.

As a sample scenario, consider a Windows Forms application written for Contoso customer service representatives. The application needs to expose a hierarchical list of orders placed with Contoso, and it should enable the reps to search on orders and edit data.

Beyond those staples, you know that you need to list orders on the screen and provide for a region that shows order details. By borrowing liberally from an existing layout theme à la Microsoft Outlook, you might arrive at a tentative form layout plan like the one shown in Figure 20.1.

FIGURE 20.1 An initial layout plan.

It is important to pay some attention to the concept of resizing. How do the form’s constituent controls respond relative to one another when a user resizes the form? What if a control element is resized because of a language change or a change in the underlying data? By fleshing out some of the resizing design intent now, you can save a mountain of work later. The prototype sketch in Figure 20.1 includes some simple text to remind you how to accommodate the different form regions during resizing.