To make development of WPF and Silverlight applications according to the Model-View-ViewModel pattern easier, I have put together a small toolkit which should speed up the creation of such applications by automating certain tasks.

Feedback

I am as always very interested in feedback, so do not hesitate to post a comment here, or contact me to start a discussion.

To be completely honest, I do not intend to add a lot of features to the toolkit. First, I am intrigued by new developments in Expression Blend 3 that I will keep under scrutiny, to see how they influence (or make obsolete) some of the features of this toolkit. Also, WPF 4 and Silverlight 3 will change the game of MVVM by (hopefully) integrating some of the concepts into the framework and making it an even more natural fit.

HOWEVER let’s keep the discussion rolling, so you know what to do if you like, dislike or want to change something in the toolkit ;)

Features

The community and Microsoft already have a few MVVM initiatives running. However, I didn’t find any completely satisfying for my particular set of requirements. Most importantly, I work as an integrator in WPF and Silverlight projects, and I use Expression Blend a lot. My toolkit is finely tuned to make working in Expression Blend much easier, for designers and developers. For instance, it allows creating design time data very easily, in order to facilitate design work. To be honest, I have been using some of the classes and concepts gathered here for quite some time already, but this is the first time that I have a clean, complete kit of features related to MVVM.

I spent a lot of time making the syntax and the features in the toolkit as compatible as possible between WPF and Silverlight. Most of the code can be shared between WPF and Silverlight. Minor changes are needed in XAML, but the ViewModels are compatible (as long as you don’t use WPF-only or Silverlight-only features of course).

Also included in the toolkit, you will find a Messenger making it super easy to enable communication between classes. Using the Messenger class and the classes in the GalaSoft.MvvmLight.Messaging namespace, you can broadcast messages to instances who registered for a particular type of message without worrying about dependencies or memory leaks.

Since it is a “light” toolkit, it should be quite easy for you to modify it to suit your own needs. Do not hesitate to inspire yourself from this code, or to modify it at will.

Manual Installation

Update: This is obsolete and has been removed. Please refer to the Get Started page for installing, and creating new MVVM Light applications.