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

Attached behaviors


Attached behaviors are generally used to cause some code to be executed on the view based on some property changes in the view model. They are phenomenal for this purpose. They are also used to tackle non-MVVM features of otherwise MVVM-based controls. For example, when using Window in WPF how can a view model cause it's associated window to be close? The only way to close a window is to directly call the Window.Close() method on the instance. Since we don't want our view models to hold references to our views, our view models cannot call Close() method directly. Window also does not have any DependencyProperty that could be bound to a view model property to allow for closing the window. One way to resolve this problem is using an attached behavior. Using this pattern, our view model sets a notification-based property and rest is taken care of by using the attached behavior approach shown next. For this technique, we need to use INotifyPropertyChanged, Data Triggers...