Ways to implement large settings dialog with WPF and MVVM

Question

I am building an extensible WPF + MVVM application that will possibly have a significant number of user settings (from both core of the application and plugins). From my previous experience I can tell that managing options dialogs is pain when the application grows. Are there any best practices or design patterns that I could follow? How other applications like Visual Studio implement options dialogs with large number of categories and settings? Are these dialogs generated at runtime?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I have had a similar issue in the past, and went for the PropertyGrid in the Extended WPF Toolkit.

This lets you bind the grid to an object, containing all of your configurable properties and will auto-populate the grid based on those properties. You can provide templates for custom editors too.