Data Driven Applications with MVVM

This ebook covers 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.

What is MVVM and why 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. At the end of the week you already have spaghetti code. You have logic that is not testable, it is very tightly coupled with the UI. You cannot make just “minor” changes without taking risks. If someone wants to understand your code, it takes days or weeks to figure out how it works.

This is where MVVM comes into play. MVVM stands for the Model – View – ViewModel pattern. It’s originated from MVC and is specific to WPF and Silverlight. The three most important things that MVVM can offer you:

Testable code
UI is loosely coupled with related logic
Maintainable code

Inside each chapter you may find a link to the source code used throughout the chapter examples.