SilverlightShow: Designer-friendly MVVM for XAML Windows Store applications Comments

Re: Designer-friendly MVVM for XAML Windows Store applications

MikeGoatly — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:40:15 GMT

Interesting approach - because you've focused on making it as easy as possible for a designer to use it has ended up as quite a clean design, although perhaps not as flexible as other libraries.

I quite like that you traverse the visual tree to find the method rather than force the designer to bind up the correct part of the VM for the action - simplicity at the expense of a marginal perf hit.

Re: Designer-friendly MVVM for XAML Windows Store applications

FilipSkakun — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:29:23 GMT

Looks good.

CallVMMethod is a bit like EventToCommand only without the need for using commands and with support for passing UI event args to a view model (which might not be the best idea if you want to reuse the view model on another platform). It feels like just handling events and calling view model methods from code behind might have better tool support and while it is a little bit more code in code behind - it is a bit more flexible without adding dependency on this helper library. It seems like making it depend on reflection might make the code less maintainable by removing the compile-time checks.

EnumToVisualState is nice since if you use visual states extensively - the visual state often depends on the view model state property. Since names of visual states are just strings - you can't really ensure compile-time checks there and it is nice to have a simple way to bind a visual state to the view model. I am only thinking it would be better if it were an attached property instead of a control.

Re: Designer-friendly MVVM for XAML Windows Store applications

andrasvelvart — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 13:01:41 GMT

You can find the VSMChangerBehavior in the original article (referenced in the intro of this one), which server the same purpose.

Re: Designer-friendly MVVM for XAML Windows Store applications

silverlightfan — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 09:05:35 GMT

Great article...nice that you have shared this helpers...I want just to ask if it is possible to see the relevant implementation in Silverlight - I am aware that there we have the triggers to help us in the first case, but what abot the hidden control...what its the equivalent?