As adoption of Silverlight and/or WPF grows throughout the development community, so does confusion over the best practices for designing and implementing UI’s in XAML. No developer actually starts with an empty form called “Window1” (at least we hope not). One of the generally accepted UI implementation best practices is the utilization of one of a number of design patterns for cleanly separating logic from the actual interfaces themselves. While there are many such patterns, one of the more popular is the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern that has become widely adopted throughout the development community.

What is this pattern? What does it do for us as developers? How can we immediately take advantage of this pattern in the applications we are building today? Why waste the time? These are questions this talk will answer (and more).

This presentation will serve as an introduction to the MVVM pattern and walk through building a Silverlight 4.0 application as a demonstration (using Visual Studio.NET 2010). We will start basic and discuss why XAML and data binding have encouraged this particular pattern and what its advantages are over traditional “code-behind” development. We will also discuss various design considerations and some gray areas where there is little industry standardization. Emphasis will be put on the data binding capabilities of WPF/Silverlight and many data binding samples will be implemented.

This session will be perfect for those developers just getting into WPF or Silverlight and looking to get off on the right foot as every attendee should walk away with a better understanding WPF, Silverlight, XAML, and MVVM. Many additional resources will also be discussed to provide next steps for those wishing to learn more.

Kevin Grossnicklaus is the president of a St. Louis, MO based consulting firm called ArchitectNow (www.architectnow.net) where he trains and mentors development teams in software architecture and best practices using leading-edge technologies and methodologies. Kevin previously spent 10 years as the .NET Practice Lead and Chief Architect at SSE (www.SSEinc.com), another St. Louis-based technology firm, where he oversaw the design, implementation, and delivery of mission critical software applications to dozens of local and national firms. In 2000, while at SSE, Kevin became involved as an early adopter of the Microsoft .NET platform (then called the Next Generation of Web Services or NGWS) and became active in the local development community to help share his knowledge and experience with these tools and technologies with any developers willing to learn. Since then, Kevin has worked with developers throughout the world on many projects around the newest .NET technologies. In 2004, Kevin became an instructor at Washington University’s Center for the Application of Information Technology (CAIT) program where he continues to teach all of the .NET related topics in both C# and VB.NET. During his time at CAIT, Kevin has helped to expand the Microsoft related curriculum through the development courses on new technologies such as LINQ, Threading, Enterprise Architecture, WPF, and WCF to name a few. Today, through ArchitectNow, Kevin is working to share his passion for and knowledge of these technologies with teams around the world.