MVVM, a WPF UI Design Pattern (Channel 9)

What is MVVM and why do people keep talking about it? Karl Shifflett explains why its buzz worthy and why you should consider it as a design pattern for your application development. Karl discusses improved unit testability (including UI testing), full separation and independence between design and code files, a sample application based on MVVM and more.

If you'd like to hear Karl go into more depth on MVVM, check out his upcoming training schedule. Events possibly coming to an area near you. If not, maybe we can convince him to take me along to film a training day. Smiley

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Minh WOOH! WOOH!

Jan 19, 2009 at 9:45 AM

Can we have a 1-paragraph about this design pattern? You know... in this post?

edit:
harsh comment removed... Just frustrated that site was down again this morning.
wkempf

Jan 19, 2009 at 9:56 AM

It's complex enough, that there's no end to variations on the pattern. MVC, MVP, MVVM, Presentation Model (MVVM is actually just PM with a different name), Passive View, and so on. The general idea in each case though is to simply partition your classes around specific responsibilities. The View is responsible only for display, the Model is responsible for business/domain logic and the Poo (http://www.drwpf.com/blog/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/27/Default.aspx) is responsible in various ways (the variation in all of those patterns) for coordinating between the View and the Model. There's as close to a 1-paragraph description as your likely to get. From there, it's time to do a LOT of research.

That said, you don't have to be an expert on this family of patterns to benefit from using it.
Minh WOOH! WOOH!

Jan 19, 2009 at 10:05 AM

See guys? The above text makes me WANT to watch the video. Thanks wizard wkempf.
stormideas stormideas - expertly crafted web applications

Jan 19, 2009 at 10:12 AM

We built out an extensive Silverlight 2 collaboration application using the standard code-behind model, you can check it out at:

http://www.colaab.com

and while we think we've built a high quality product some of the lessons we learned are pushing us to use MVVM pattern for building out additional functionality.

There's a good set of links regarding the MVVM pattern in this StackOverflow question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/375301/should-i-use-the-model-view-viewmodel-mvvm-pattern-in-silverlight-projects

Thanks,

Bob

--
Bob Thomson
storm ideas

http://colaab.com
http://blog.stormideas.com
twitter: movingforwards
AdamKinney Agent of Change

Jan 19, 2009 at 10:48 AM

Thanks for the suggestion Minh. Especially since this was meant as an introduction to the pattern, I probably should have put more detail into the introduction. Thanks wkempf and Bob for adding some context.
Hal Diggs

Jan 19, 2009 at 8:48 PM

Well it's enough to "whet" my appitite. Looking forward to hearing more. Sorry I can't make the training in Cali... come visit Texas sometime
Svavar9

Jan 20, 2009 at 9:32 AM

This reminds me of when I used XSLT for (X)HTML output.

Basically I'd have a server control that took an XSLT for display rather than using a user control with a code-in-front. I would then serialize the object I wanted to display into XML and pass it to the XSLT. The nice thing was that I could use the same C# code for an RSS feed, an HTML list on a page, and a JSON feed to name a few just by swapping out XSLTs.

I imagine WPF is way more elaborate with the 2-way databinding though.
Bydia Donald

Jan 20, 2009 at 4:58 PM

Can you post a link so that we can download the powerpoint that is in the video? Thanks in advance.
AdamKinney Agent of Change

Jan 21, 2009 at 8:33 AM

Definitely, here are the slides used in the interview.

http://cid-1e3310e77ddfeb1b.skydrive.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Channel9/MVVM%20Slides.zip
DanielAuger

Jan 22, 2009 at 6:12 PM

This is a good video about what MVVM is all about, but I'd recommend the following video for those of you who want to learn how to make it happen in code:

Video
Code
jimmyzimms

Apr 01, 2009 at 2:26 PM

wkempf,

Glad that you break the pattern down like that as well. I've spent a lot of time here at a rather large software company headquatered in Redmond teaching M-V-VM in exactly that way.

Cheers
Nixon

Jul 17, 2009 at 3:14 PM

Nice video there!!!!

Have you any plan to migrate to C# in the near future
mshelp.be

Feb 06, 2010 at 3:36 AM

Why is the quality of this video so poor?
Troll Doll

Feb 09, 2010 at 8:24 AM

I love the "design patterns" of their shirts...
Ashokkumar

Oct 25, 2010 at 11:21 AM

I expect more videos about MVVM Pattern.
NYC_DOT_NET

Jan 18, 2011 at 2:07 PM

Nice introduction