title: Architecture for WinForms applications?
body: <p>I have started a WinForms project a few weeks ago and as I did not really know what features I wanted, I just added them along the way. This now caused a horrible mess where my MainForm is a big ball of mud and where for example some important state changes are triggered by UI elements to the point I have to call the OnChange Event of a Control in order to change some state in the database.</p>
  
  <p>In short: I've just started a new project where I want to take a better approach. I just don't know which would be the "good" one. In ASP.net MVC, I found the MVVM Pattern really useful, but on the Desktop, MVVM seems to be only intended for WPF, not for WinForms.</p>
  
  <p>The other approach is a three-tier-architecture: I have my Database-Class which currently talks directly to the UI. I now create a new Static Class ("ApplicationState") that talks to the database and fires events to tell the UI "Hey, Something changed!". The UI would manipulate the State which will then handle the database persistence and again raise Events if the UI needs updating. The point here is that the ApplicationState class never modifies the UI directly, but that the UI subscribes to Events. That <em>looks</em> like a clean/"MVC-y" way of doing it, but maybe I am overlooking something here?</p>
  
  <p>Basically my ultimate goal would be to have the UI completely independent from the database layer just to make sure I don't wire in business logic into the UI again.</p>