Tales from the Smart Client

Model/View/ViewModel is a variation of Model/View/Controller (MVC) that is tailored for modern UI development platforms where the View is the responsibility of a designer rather than a classic developer. The designer is generally a more graphical, artistic...

My favorite feature of WPF (desktop and web versions) is attached properties. It would be good enough if attached properties merely enabled things like keeping layout properties (Canvas.Left) organized by the type of container rather than the type of...

I've had several questions about when and why to use M-V-VM versus other approaches. The obvious purpose is abstraction of the View, reducing the amount of business logic or glue code stuck in code-behind. All tasty goodness abstractly, but here's another...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd419663.aspx

Trapped deep within the pragmatic hacker that is the essential me, there still lurks a computer scientist. The computer scientist isn't even screaming to get out; he's been so long buried in the deepest dungeons that he is grown to accept his fate, adopted...

As I’ve described before , we introduced the new VisualStateManager concept into Silverlight WPF before we added the same functionality in desktop WPF, in violation of our general guideline that Silverlight is functionally a subset of the desktop .NET...

Conceptually there isn't much to M-V-VM that can be expressed in UML...but if the GoF authors can use UML to describe Singleton (one object), I guess can make a 4 box UML diagram for M-V-VM.

The ClickBehavior is about the simplest I can think of. For illustration purposes I only included one command, but LeftClickCommand, DoubleClickCommand, MouseOverCommand etc. are all obvious extensions: public static class ClickBehavior { public...

I've been promising an example of the Model-View-ViewModel pattern for some time. With the Feb CTP of WinFX out and the Feb CTP of Expression Interactive Designer close, I feel like I can post something that will work for awhile. I had more ambitious...

In the first iteration of this example, I databound the View directly to the Model. While not pretty, this was surprisingly functional. The list box was populated and when you changed selection through the list you automatically get a detail view of the...

I think we have conflated several concepts with RoutedCommands: 1) The ICommand part with it's Execute/CanExecute methods ... basically this is just a form of method dispatch that lends itself to declarative systems 2) Common Verbs or Actions -...

The name of the product I work on is Microsoft Expression Code Named "Interactive Designer/Sparkle". This is not the final name. For four years it has internally been known as Sparkle. So for a history of the product, I'll use that name. I wasn't around...

In preparing my example of Model-View-ViewModel I had a lot of help from Adrian Sanchez, who previewed the code and asked me questions about it. It was a big help in figuring out what needed explanation. When I started on Expression I heard about the...

I've got a frustrated anonymous poster who complains that my definition of ViewModel in Model/View/ViewModel is exactly that of Controller in MVC, and references Cocoa. It appears to me that Cocoa has changed the definition of Controller from the original...

There is quite a bit of discussion internally and externally about the role of XAML in WinFX development. One of the main questions is "Why would I use XAML instead of C# or VB?" Simply put, "Sparkle", "Cider" and other design tools provide the main...

Expression Interactive Designer (aka Sparkle) is a 100% .NET, managed code application. The source is currently more than 1200 .cs files and about 140 .xaml files totally 210,000 some lines of C# and 23,000 some lines of XAML. There is no unmanaged...

I am an architect of WPF, both the full desktop version and the subset that provides the UI framework for Silverlight. This subsetting exercise raises challenges I've not run into before when designing software. Simply put, how do we keep the framework...

This weekend I continued my experiments with Python and Avalon. Before I was hosting Python in an existing app, but now I've started from almost scratch. I have to clean up the code and wait for the outside world to get new Avalon bits, but I can describe...

There have been a raft of interesting articles and discussions of MVC patterns and WPF. A practical introduction is here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WPF/MVCtoUnitTestinWPF.aspx I love the article, but must add I have always struggled with RoutedCommands...

I got e-mail from an interested party pointing me to Martin Fowler's description of the PresentationModel pattern. Written up just last year, I hadn't seen it in the literature before. I've got to read it a couple of times and think about the subtleties...

A friend pointed me to this great article about MVC: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhatsaControllerAnyway The central claim is that MVC had a very clear definition in SmallTalk, which was changed by either NextSTEP or Ivar Jacobsen depending whom you talk...

Julian Dominguez is writing a series about the PresentationModel pattern and using it with WPF. http://staff.southworks.net/blogs/jdominguez/archive/2008/05/20/First-approach-to-Presentation-Model-with-DataTemplates.aspx and Glenn Block has just posted...

The Silverlight and desktop WPF implementations of Templates use the same syntax and programming model for describing the tree of objects that make up the control body, but differ in how they describe dynamic changes of the template. In desktop WPF, this...

CollectionView is a very interesting construct. After including it in my ViewModel I meant to quickly blog about the usage...but when I started thinking about it and reading a bit more about it, it becomes even more interesting. Lots of good blogging...

I was reading a thread about Commands in the WPF Disciples group and noticed a comment about being unable to initialize an attached property where the type was collection. The problem was unless you put in an explicit Collection object tag, the property...