Book Image

MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF

Book Image

MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF

Overview of this book

MVVM (Model View View Model) is a Microsoft best practices pattern for working in WPF and Silverlight that is highly recommended by both Microsoft and industry experts alike. This book will look at the reasons for the pattern still being slow to become an industry standard, addressing the pain points of MVVM. It will help Silverlight and WPF programmers get up and running quickly with this useful pattern.MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF will help you to choose the best MVVM approach for your project while giving you the tools, techniques, and confidence that you will need to succeed. Implementing MVVM can be a challenge, and this book will walk you through the main issues you will come across when using the pattern in real world enterprise applications.This book will help you to improve your WPF and Silverlight application design, allowing you to tackle the many challenges in creating presentation architectures for enterprise applications. You will be given examples that show the strengths and weaknesses of each of the major patterns. The book then dives into a full 3 tier enterprise implementation of MVVM and takes you through the various options available and trade-offs for each approach. During your journey you will see how to satisfy all the demands of modern WPF and Silverlight enterprise applications including scalability, testability, extensibility, and blendability.Complete your transition from ASP.NET and WinForms to Silverlight and WPF by embracing the new tools of these platforms, and the new design style that they allow for. MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF will get you up to speed and ready to take advantage of this powerful new presentation platform.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF
Credits
Foreword
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
MVVM Frameworks
Index

Chapter 10. Using Non-MVVM Third-party Controls

By Muhammad Shujaat Siddiqi

The development community has been slow in adopting MVVM and as a result there are many third-party libraries and controls on the market that don't follow the pattern. One of the most common challenges faced when adopting MVVM is how to use non-MVVM libraries and controls in MVVM architecture. The good news is that we will review several techniques which will allow you to minimize the impact of the non-MVVM code in your design and maximize the testability of your codebase.

As an example, we are going to use the WPF WebBrowser control. This is complex enough example to explain all the different available techniques and yet simple enough to be covered in a single chapter. The WebBrowser control is just a WPF wrapper around same old WebBrowser ActiveX control from the Win32/MFC days. Like many Silverlight and WPF controls on the market, the WebBroswer control wasn't built using the MVVM approach and instead has forms...