Separating UI code from everything else

For some time now I’ve been trying to improve the seperation of my application code from the user interface (sometimes with more success than others). This is a known good practice, and yet I regularly see code (yes, even code that I’ve written) where business logic has “leaked” into the UI.  A useful “thought experiment” I often use is “How much of this code would I have to change if I wanted to re-write this as a console application?” (or whatever UI type I’m NOT using in the current app I’m writing). A number of times I think this has helped put things in perspective for me, or at the very least be more explicit about my assumptions. Recently I finished working on a small-ish utility of my own and decided it would be useful if there was a command line version. I was fairly pleased with the results - I ended up moving one method from the UI (which really didn’t belong there) down into the “business” tier. I was equally pleased when I saw almost no duplicated code between the console UI and WinForms UI. I would reccomend it to anyone who would like to REALLY see how de-coupled their UI is from their business objects.

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