Silverlight MVVM Where to start

Question

My company is making a big push to silverlight and I am getting everything laid out for this push. I am investigating Prism and MVVM in Silverlight. Is this the best way to go. Anyone know any good END to END Tutorials on MVVM in Silverlight.

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Rico,

Have you considered downloading the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - October 2009?

It's a hefty collection of really useful examples (26 in total) and there's a great help file which walks you through them all. I hope you find what you're looking for!

Answer 2

If it is only MVVM you are looking for and do not care about all the other stuff you get with PRISM, you might want to check out some of the smaller frameworks as well. I am using the MVVM Light Toolkit by Laurent Bugnion, but there are others as well. Here is a similar thread:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1280462/what-mvvm-framework-are-you-using

Answer 3

Mike Taulty's series of Prism (Microsoft's MVVM framework) for Silveright videos is awesome. It took me several days to watch all the videos and do the sample code along with the videos, but it really drove home Prism. I think there are at least 8 hours of actual video. It was well worth the watch for me.

He starts with simple concepts in a console app, and then about a 1/3 of the way through the videos takes the concepts and starts applying them with Prism/Unity in a Silverlight app. He tackles several common problems.

Mike Tault's Blog Post linking to his Channel 9 videos.

Here is the Microsoft Patterns and Practices (the team that wrote Prism and Unity) web site for Prism and Unity.

That should get you started.

Answer 4

My company recently built a comprehensive toolkit that puts together powerful MVVM Framework and 70+ UI controls to ease the development of LOB Silverlight application using MVVM pattern.

Since MVVM involves both architectural and UI (not only architectural layer that most MVVM libraries offered), the most ideal solution would be the one that offer both implementation in a single box, so that developers can really focus on business logic, rich presentation and user experiences that matter to them -- not on hundreds of interfaces or abstract classes :)

Check out my latest blog post at http://tinyurl.com/383odnm for more details. Hope this helps.

Answer 5

Not sure if this will help - but I really struggled with the same things it sounds like you are. I started out by learning the MVVM-light toolkit. The documentation was a little light and scattered, but I learned a lot.

From my learning, I decided to create my own toolkit - nothing really new, but just the simplest approaches I could find. This gave me the greatest comfort moving into MVVM patterned development. My toolkit is available at http://slmvvms.codeplex.com/ if you would like to take a look - I have provided some documentation to get you started, and I'm working on a sample application, and walkthrough.

Good luck!

Answer 6

How about we start at the basics? I wrote an article specifically to address the fundamentals of MVVM: why would you use it, what is it all about, and how does it solve common problems? Check it out here:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/mvvm-explained.aspx