Anxiety. This is a feeling I’ve been learning to recognize as a SIGN when I’m coding. The feeling you get when the camera gets really close on the face of the pretty girl as she walks around the empty, and silent, house. Is she going to turn around suddenly and be given flowers? Or is the disemboweling only moments away. You don’t know, but you’re cringing either way.

I’ve felt this in the past about data access layers. This is the feeling I’ve been accumulating around my Windows Forms application lately. I don’t want to code. I’m afraid to code. It’s going to be painful. I’m not sure what’s going to go wrong. But something will, and I’ll be sucked into the unproductive death pit.

Having spent a bit of time feeling around the problem, I’m pretty sure what I don’t like is having to deal with events. Let’s take a look at the reason why:

Windows forms makes things easy.

Click click click! I have a button and I have an event linked to it. Amazingly productive. My app will be running in no time.

Event Handlers are teh awesome.

It’s so easy to link an action to an event handler. Well. It’s pretty easy. It’s very easy within one class. Not so bad if you’ve got a reference to the object that contains the event handler. A little bit of encapsulation makes it harder. Chained event handlers can fix that though……

All is happy with one form per task.

This form is easy. Add a few buttons and it’s great. If you’re prepared to make your application out of a bunch of forms that the user will work with one-by-one, there’s no problem.

However….sovereign apps don’t look like that.

If the user is going to be in one application all day long, it will have to provide easy access to a number of different types of functionality. The application can’t consolidate all of the interface elements required for a single task into a single place. Rather there’s a spaghetti monster of functionality, reaching it’s noodley appendages everywhere.

Events flying every which way, and everything needs a hard reference to everything else.

Can you actually wire all this up with EventHandler references? Sure. Of course you can. However, you end with a lot of tightly coupled code that is a real mess to create and to maintain.

Hope. The eternal struggle.

A application shell is a complicated beast. But problems have solutions. In my next post, I’ll show how you can integrate all these separate components without strangling yourself in wiring.