Hi,

I'm quite new to VB.Net and I need to develop an
application that will have more than 200 windows in it. It
will be a 3-tier development (the business layer is
already written as a seperate VB.Net dll).

My question now is, how can I develop the GUI the best? In
multiple, seperate dll's, or all in 1 big project? It must
be possible to have multiple instances of all windows.

Please help me out, thanks,

Sigurd Decroos

YUNIIT DEVELOPMENT NV
Softwaer Manager

Ummmm- you don't make GUI's in DLL's. You make them in EXE's...

Well, I guess technically you could make a library of screens in a DLL and then use an EXE to decide which to show and stuff..

I'd probably put them all in the exe.

However if you think you will need screen reuse then you could put groups of screens that might need reuse in a DLL or in many DLL's. As long as it's all in .NET the performance is practically the same no matter which way you do it. It's all for your convienence.



Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC

Well, I have 1 exe (I call it the 'launcher') from where the screens are called, but I need to know the best (fastest) way to do this, now it's done with 'Assembly.LoadFrom' and 'MyAssembly.CreateInstance("name of dll"). Would 'System.Activator' be better (faster)?

Also, about memory, is it normal my programs keeps 'growing', even after closing the opened forms?

Why would you use either? Reference the DLL in the references section and just

Pseudocode....

make sure when your done with anything you set the object to nothing (and close it when appropriate- like with data access).

The other thing to realise is .NET does memory cleanup "when there is time". So you might see the memory growing before the cleanup is done- and then a cleanup will take place and the memory will go back down. Memory really isn't "released" until that cleanup takes place.

Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC

About the dll referencing...
The problem is that any form must be able to call any other form, so I'm using a 'plug-in'-structure now. I will not say this is the best method, but I can't find a way to do it in a more appropriate one. all this forms implement the same interface 'IPlugIn' and have an event in common (which is located in the launcher->a delegate).
In this project it must be possible to disable/enable some forms (dll's), simply by removing/copying the specific dll.

This is my first 'big' project. So this isn't 'self explainable' to me, sorry.

Thanx for the replies so far btw

I must be missing something- because it sounds like you doing it in a way that is much more complex than it needs to be. Perhaps someone else will more experience will have a better answer for you.

Hal Levy
Daddyshome, LLC