WPF MVVM Toolkit 0.1 Released!
Model-View separation is not a novel idea in the software industry. It has been around for at least 30 years. Recently, however, MV separation is seeing a lot of renewed interest, powered both by the growing complexity of software and by the need to provide different UI experiences, reusing the same underlying business logic.
WPF provides a lot of native functionality (commanding, databinding, etc.), enabling developers to build applications with proper model-view separation. So far, however, we have not provided simple guidance on how to utilize these features to build properly factored applications with model-view separation.
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I am very happy to announce that on Friday we released the first preliminary version of the WPF Model-View-ViewModel Toolkit (MVVM is WPF’s equivalent of the classic MVC design pattern). The toolkit is available for download on the “WPF Futures” codeplex site.
The toolkit consists of:
- A Visual Studio template, allowing you to quickly create WPF Model-View-ViewModel Applications
- Documentation
- A general introduction to the MVVM design pattern
- A detailed walk-through, demonstrating how to create a simple MVVM application, starting from the skeleton generated by the template
- A complete MVVM application example – a WPF messenger application.
Big kudos to Patrick Danino – an engineer on our team – who worked on the toolkit from inception to its successful first preliminary release.
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This first preliminary version of the toolkit is fairly simple and clearly not aimed at MVVM experts. We have adopted an evolutionary approach of delivery, so we invite everybody out there – from folks looking to pick up MVVM for their next project to MVVM experts – to collaborate with us on the toolkit, by sharing both real-world experiences as well as first-time-exposure feedback.
We will use this feedback to drive improvements in the toolkit, in the WPF platform and in the relevant authoring tools (Visual Studio, Expression Blend, etc).