Sunday 10th January 2010

an event occurred under the name of “Deep Dive Silverlight 3”  by Stephen Kennedy,  attended by both sides of DubaiDev.NET and Techies.ae UGs.

We witnessed Stephen talk about design patterns, coming from MVC, passing MVP and for WPF/Silverlight the usage of MVVM. Stephen explained why we should be using this and also the trouble we’d run into when not. He took us through a basic implementation of a XAML page (view) that has two texts on it and a supporting class (model) that has two properties. as we should not let the viewmodel have any knowledge of the view he explained why we would have to use some INotifyPropertyChanged interface implementation to tell the observer (view) the data has changed in the viewmodel (and the model respectively). For this he advised us to use a base class to do that work and leverage that code in all of the derived classes. For Collections he instructed to use the generic ObservableCollection types and have a ViewModel for the content of that collection to which a new view should be bound when using the data in a view. He showed us a trick how to work around not having commands in Silverlight leveraging attached property on controls. Finally we went through several best practices and optimizations, rounding it all up with a Q/A session. Stephen provided the deck for Techies.ae to attach to the notes.

Please find the PowerPoint slides on the SkyDrive added by Rolf the leader of Techies.ae

check DubaiDev.NET group on facebook for more photos.

Happy Programming :)
Rami M. Nassar