MVVM Light

There are many great MVVM frameworks out there, and we review many of them in Appendix A, but throughout this book we will be using the MVVM Light toolkit by Laurent Bugnion and GalaSoft. The toolkit is available for free on Code Plex (http://mvvmlight.codeplex) and offers many features, including:

• A lean framework that offers only what is needed for MVVM

• Project templates for both WPF and Silverlight, in both Visual Studio and Blend

• Blendability support is written into the templates

• Service locator pattern is written into the templates

• Item templates for Visual Studio and Blend

  • Create a new view model

  • Create a new view

  • Create a new view model locator, a class that holds and manages references to view models

• Code snippets to help increase productivity when implementing MVVM

  • mvvminpc adds a new bindable property to a view model

  • mvvmlocatorproperty adds a new view model to a view mode locator

  • mvvmpropa adds a new attached property to a dependency object (WPF only)

  • mvvmpropdp adds a new...