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I've heard many times that people are using the DomainDataSource in ViewModel scenarios.  Contrary to popular belief, this can work very well with the control as it is today; there are only a couple features that won't work outside the visual tree.  Aside from these two items, everything the DomainDataSource does is supported in a ViewModel.

Davide Zordan continues with his experiments using MEF, MVVM and Silverlight 4 Beta and this time explains about using different ViewModel classes and how to retrieve the data using an async call to a WCF service.

Today I had the opportunity to take a look at the code written in the previous posts and insert some new stuff in order to modify the project and make new experiments about:

1. using a different ViewModel class for the design-time and run-time;

2. using MEF combined with the new implicit styles feature available in Silverlight 4 Beta to initialize the DataContext of the View at run-time;

3. retrieve the data using an async call to a WCF service and passing back the results to the VM via MEF.

As with any emerging patterns, there are lots of variations, all with their strengths and weaknesses.. I have picked an approach that I felt was best as an introduction.

You can find Brad's full series here.

Last week Jeff Handley wrote an article about the ViewModel Pattern and this week he continues the topic with two more articles - HelloWorld.ViewModel and Binding Converters - VisibilityConverter.

Mike Taulty starts the week with a great article about localization and globalization in Silverlight 2.

The guys from the "Expression Blend and Design" blog provides with some tips of how to simulate sample data in Expression Blend while designing.

Also don't miss Mike Snows and his Tip of the day #66 - How to copy XAML for Silverlight from Expression Designer.

Alex Knight posted a nice tutorial about skinning a button with Expression Blend.

Here is one post about Windows Azure Service Platform by Gill Cleeren. It seems that we can expect a lot from it!

John Papa discuss how Netflix has announced it will use Silverlight to stream movies to the Mac in his post called "An Also Ran?".

Corey Schuman talks about the AOL's Silverlight mail server.

At the blog of DevExpress you can see a cool preview of their Silverlight controls - AgDataGrid, AgMenu Suite, AgNavBar control, AgLayoutControl Library and AgRichTextEdit control. Some of them are already released and some are to be released, but all of them look really nice and I'm really impatient to see the new ones in action!

Don't hesitate to check out the site Walt Ritscher made in Silverlight for presenting his Shazzam tool. It's a WPF Pixel Shader effect tool and, as Walt wrote, its source code will be soon available on CodePlex. In this post you can find additional info about it.\

Gerard Leblanc posted the second article of his series about Menus in Silverlight. The topic is multi-level drop down menu and if you missed the first part better check it out here.

And last but not least for today - Dan Wahlin and his article about Adding Style to Silverlight 2 Controls.