Chapter 1, Presentation Patterns, gives the reader an example-driven overview of the history of presentation patterns. We will implement a Project Billing sample application using various approaches including MVC and MVP. Along the way, we will look at the issues with each pattern that motivated the next pattern in the evolutionary chain. This chapter also demonstrates how presentation patterns that require .NET events, such as MVC and MVP, can cause memory leaks if not properly implemented. This chapter will leave the reader with the knowledge needed to discuss the tradeoffs of the various presentation patterns and allow the reader to answer question like why use MVVM over MVP or MVC.

Chapter 2, Introduction to MVVM, covers the various features of WPF and Silverlight that make MVVM an attractive option on these platforms. We will follow this by re-implementing the Project Billing sample application from the first chapter using MVVM. We will then look at some of the benefits and cost of using MVVM. We will finish off the chapter by taking a quick look at the MVVM Light open source framework that will be used throughout the book.

Chapter 3, Northwind—Foundations, will walk through how to lay the foundation of the Northwind application that we will build over the next four chapters. We will wire up the Northwind database using Entity Framework and see how Entity Framework integrates with the binding systems in WPF and Silverlight to provide change notifications. We will also add unit tests that allow us to see how MVVM allows us to test all of our view logic.

Chapter 4, Northwind—Services and Persistence Ignorance, will have us attempting to make our application more scalable by adding a WCF service layer between the Presentation Layer and the Application Layer. We will see how WCF integrates with the binding system in both WPF and Silverlight to provide change notifications. We will also look at the benefits and cost of implementing a Persistence Ignorant Presentation Layer.

Chapter 5, Northwind—Commands and User Inputs, discusses the benefits of taking advantage of the commanding system in WPF and Silverlight to implement MVVM using the pure approach.

Chapter 6, Northwind —Hierarchical View Model and IoC, explains the power and productivity that can be added by using the Hierarchical View Model approach to MVVM. We will also see how to implement an Inversion of Control framework using IoC best practices by updating our application to use the Ninject for IoC framework.

Chapter 7, Dialogs and MVVM, discusses the various options for showing modal and modeless dialogs. It also discusses how data can be shared across the dialogs that we will create.

Chapter 8, Workflow-based MVVM Applications, explains how we can use Windows WF to control the flow of the user interface. It would also be touching the area of business rules validation using WF including the discussion about slow executing workflows.

Chapter 9, Validation, discusses the various techniques for data entry and business rules validation. The chapter will also be shedding some light on how the results of these validations can be displayed to the user.

Chapter 10, Using Non-MVVM Third-party Controls, will focus on the discussion regarding the usage of non-MVVM based controls in your MVVM based design to improve the testability of our code base.

Chapter 11, MVVM and Application Performance, explains some features of XAML frameworks targeting for better application performance.

Appendix A, MVVM Frameworks, outlines the basic features to look for before selecting an MVVM framework or toolkit. It also lists the available MVVM frameworks popular in the industry.

Appendix B, Binding at a Glance, summarizes the Binding System infrastructure, which makes MVVM possible in WPF and Silverlight.

This book will be a valuable resource for Silverlight and WPF developers who want to fully maximize the tools with recommended best practices for enterprise development. This is an advanced book and you will need to be familiar with C#, the .NET framework, and Silverlight or WPF.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "You should now be able to execute ICustomerService.GetCustomers() from WCF Test Client."

A block of code is set as follows:

public class RepositoryRegistry : Registry
{
    public RepositoryRegistry()
    {
        For<IUIDataProvider>()
            .Singleton();
        For<ICustomerService>()
            .Singleton()
            .Use(() => new CustomerServiceClient());
    }
}

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

public class OrderViewModel : ViewModelBase
{
    public const string ModelPropertyName = "Model";
    private Order _model;
    public Customer Customer { get; set; }
    private readonly IToolManager _toolManager;exten =>i,1,Voicemail(s0)

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "This will add a Show Details link to our grid".

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