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In this post Dan Wahlin explains the key concepts in the MVVM Pattern.

With the increasing popularity of Silverlight as an application development framework the discussion of patterns has grown louder and louder. Fortunately the majority of developers building Silverlight applications have agreed on a pattern that fits well in the Silverlight world called Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM). The MVVM pattern allows applications to be divided up into separate layers that provide multiple benefits ranging from better code re-use to enhanced testing capabilities. This post will explain key concepts found in the MVVM pattern and attempt to present them in a way that is easy to understand. I’ll show some code along the way to demonstrate how the MVVM pattern can be used and provide a few alternatives when it comes to binding data.

 

Overall, MVVM is very attractive – but all the screen casts I’ve seen avoid some confusing pitfalls that you’ll come up against in the real world. The landscape at the time of writing is a plethora of frameworks that attempt to solve similar problems; I expect the community will settle on a small number eventually, and certain patterns will emerge. Until then, I hope this will help.

Excellent article by Shawn Wildermuth about the Model-View-ViewModel pattern in Silverlight 2 applications.

If you are trying to learn what kind of architectures work well in Silverlight applications, take a look at my new MSDN Magazine article. It introduces the Model-View-ViewModel architecture pattern and how it works in Silverlight. You can read the article here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd458800.aspx