Chapter 2. Introduction to MVVM

By Ryan Vice

In this chapter, we will introduce the Model View View Model pattern (MVVM) and help you better understand the current state of affairs of MVVM. This knowledge will lay a foundation that we will expand on throughout this book, to give you the tools and knowledge you need to take advantage of the many benefits of MVVM.

We will start with a brief history of the MVVM pattern, and then we will look at the structure of MVVM. Next, we will take a look at the features of WPF and Silverlight that make MVVM such an attractive option and follow this by diving into our first MVVM sample. Next, we will look at the benefits of using MVVM and discuss how we capitalized on those benefits in the MVVM sample that we built. We will follow this by looking at the challenges that can make MVVM difficult; addressing these challenges with various tools and techniques will be covered in the later chapters of this book and will make up a large majority of this book's...