[pkphilip]

If you are going for declarative UIs, please consider using a separate file for storing the UI and a "code behind" which is the C/C++ source file for that screen. This external file can be written in a form suitable for IDEs to read/write the form properties including all of the components in the form in the hierarchy in which they are put in during the design of the form.

The powerful approach used by Delphi for this is something I have never seen any other language use - where you could create your own components and these components could persist their properties into this external file used for storing the details about the form. So when the IDE loads the design from the external file, it would call the components to read the properties from the file to repopulate itself. This allowed for very powerful and deep components to be developed in Delphi