Application(solution) structure for Model View Presenter(+ Passive View) in WinForms?

Question

Once upon a time I wrote a code that, with time, started to smell. It was not coded in a way that it could be easily tested. There were tight coupling on each of the children windows with database-centric Microsoft controls (like BindingNavigator, etc). But then it came the day when I was tired of my own code as it was not reusable, testable, or understandable (even by myself).

After reading about better ways to split presentation from business logic and database access/persistence, I came up with the first big change. I was then able to call a presenter for the children forms of my, let’s say, “MainForm”.

Nowadays, I have a bunch of Presenters, Views, Repositories, Models and Interfaces which I would like to organize in a “standard” project structure (i.e. projects like Business, Model, UI, Test). Can somebody expose such a structure, and, if possible, example folders they use inside each of them?

Also, should I use an only-one “MainPresenter”? or is it better to have one for each children form I will use, for example:

var searchReceivalPresenter = new SearchReceivalsPresenter(
       new SearchReceivalsForm { MdiParent = this }, new SearchReceivalsRepository());

In my opinion I should keep several presenters.

Thanks in advance,

Answer 1

I think there may be some misunderstanding of MVP here - I wrote an article about how to do MVP with Windows Phone 7, but I cover the basics of MVP, and you should be able to understand the general theory and then apply it to WinForms:

Developing WP7 apps using the MVP pattern

But to quickly answer your question, every Form should implement a View interface, and every Presenter should handle 1 and only 1 View interface.

Where it gets tricky with WinForms is when you want to open a child Form. What I ended up doing is having the parent Presenter directly call a Show method on the child Presenter. The child Presenter would then use Dependency Injection to instantiate an implementation of the related View interface.

UPDATE (because I didn't fully answer the question) :)

Let me describe a project structure i've used for a winforms/MVP app:

/ - solution root

/[App]Core - project that contains the Model - pure business logic
/[App]Core/Model - data model (lowercase "m"), POCOs
/[App]Core/Daos - data access layer (all interfaces)
/[App]Core/Services - business logic classes (interfaces and implementations)

/[App]Ui - project that contains all UI-related code, but is UI-agnostic
/[App]Ui/Model - contains POCOs that are used by the UI but not the Core
/[App]Ui/Presenters - contains presenters
/[App]Ui/Views - contains view interfaces

/[App][Platform] - project that contains all UI-specific code (e.g. WinRT, WinPhone, WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, etc)
/[App][Platform]/Daos - implementation of DAO interfaces defined in [App]Core
/[App][Platform]/Services - implementation of business logic interfaces defined in [App]Core
/[App][Platform]/Views - implementation of view interfaces defined in [App]Ui

Is that more like what you were asking for?