Silverlight MVVM in VS2008 - a non starter?

Question

I'm still very new to Silverlight. I'm currently using vs2008 at work. As far as I can gather Silverlight 4 is vs2010 only. I stumbled across this article on command binding, it says that command binding is a new feature introduced in silverlight 4. Is command binding integral to MVVM in silverlight, does it make MVVM much simpler to implement?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Commanding does make MVVM much easier, but it's also very easy to provide your own reusable commanding infrastructure. Attached Behaviors give you an easy way to right up a generic way to attach a Command to events.

I while back I wrote a very generic behavior that provides three properties: Command, CommandParameter, and EventName. It then uses reflection to wire up EventName and whene that event gets thrown it calls the Command. It's a very simple solution and is actually much more flexible than the direct commands on the SL4 controls, because you can attach to any event you like.

Answer 2

Any XAML work in VS 2008 is a non-starter. The IDE is just too slow and buggy.