31 July 2010
The CSLA .NET and MVVM video series is now complete and online.
- Click here to purchase
- Click here to download if you’ve already purchased the series
The first video in the series is available for free from the download page, so you can get a better idea about the approach I’m taking in using MVVM with CSLA 4 and Silverlight or WPF.
This is a six part series (nearly 3.5 hours of content) covering the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) design pattern and how to efficiently apply it when your model is constructed using CSLA 4, and your UI is built using Silverlight or WPF.
That means you have a rich business domain model that fully encapsulates your business logic (validation, authorization, calculations, etc), and those objects (thanks to CSLA) fully support all the data binding semantics for Silverlight and WPF. And it means you have access to useful helper components and controls from the Csla.Xaml namespace, including viewmodel base classes, validation information display and UI event triggering to help wire up UI events to viewmodel verbs/methods.
The series also makes use of the Bxf framework, which is an extremely lightweight MVVM UI framework designed to illustrate the basic concepts of an MVVM framework. Like MVC, it is really impossible to make effective use of the MVVM design pattern without some level of framework support. Something has to manage the creation and display of views, and the process of wiring up a viewmodel to a view, just like something has to route commands to a controller and render views in MVC. Bxf is the smallest possible set of framework behaviors I’ve been able to identify that makes MVVM practical to implement.
As a bonus, the sixth video in the series discusses how to apply the concepts from the video series in CSLA .NET 3.8.4 with Visual Studio 2008. Even if you can’t move to CSLA 4, .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 yet, the vast majority of the content in this video series is still valuable!
If you are using CSLA .NET to build Silverlight or WPF applications, or if you want to explore some practical ways to think about and implement the MVVM design pattern, this video series is a must have!