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Introduction

In this short series of articles I’ll cover what MVVM is and how to use it in practice, how to solve issues when applying this pattern and how to take advantage from it.

1. Part I: The Basics
2. Part II: Messaging, Unit Testing and moving to a live data source
3. Part III: Validation, Closer integration with the view

In the previous article we discussed what MVVM is and why it matters. In this article we’ll try to benefit from the pattern and talk about the issues you have to battle through when working with MVVM. Our sample application was able to pull some data from a model, and display it on the screen in a master-detail fashion.

What is MVVM and why do you need it?

Do you know the feeling, when you start to develop an application, and in the first couple of days you feel good because you made a really good progress? Do you know the feeling, when after a couple of days, you feel that your design is not that best and when you have to modify a little code, you are afraid of the effect it might have on other parts of you code? The first sign of a bad design is when applying a hack is easier than to implement it the proper way.

Why is multitasking missing and how to hide the fact?

Windows Phone 7 at this very moment does not support Multitasking for 3rd party applications. There are a lot of reasons for that and as an IPhone user I could not agree more with this decision. Running different applications parallel means more power consumption, more memory consumption and higher cpu load. These factors directly lead to reduced User Experience, like your battery says goodbye in a couple of hours, the screen is not so smooth when using multitouch, it’s „lagging”, or changing between applications might get really slow.

Introduction

The last few weeks have been very exciting. At PDC 2009 Microsoft announced WCF RIA Services which is now the official name of .NET RIA Services. Their intention is to emphasize how close RIA Services and WCF is. However there were minor changes to the API it didn’t affect my previous article so you can still consider it valid.

In my last article I wrote about the basic concepts of WCF RIA Services and n-tier development. In this one we’ll talk about the features of WCF RIA Services in terms of creating complex queries.

1. Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I
2. Building N-Tier business applications with WCF RIA Services – Part II

Introduction

In this series of articles we will talk about buildng N-Tier Silverlight business application, why we want to use multiple tiers, what problems we have to face and how .NET RIA Services can help us solve our issues.

1. Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I
2. Building N-Tier business applications with WCF RIA Services – Part II

Going N-Tier

If you develop complex business applications with a large codebase that can easily adapt to changing environments you introduce multiple tiers or layers. For example, you create a Data Access Layer that communicates with your data source whatever that is and passes the requested data to the layer above in object oriented form.