MVVM/Presentation Model With WinForms

Posted by Erik Ashepa on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Erik Ashepa
Published on 2009-09-15T18:50:04Z Indexed on 2010/04/23 4:53 UTC
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Hi, I'm currently working on a brownfield application, it's written with winforms, as a preparation to use WPF in a later version, out team plans to at least use the MVVM/Presentation model, and bind it against winforms...

I've explored the subject, including the posts in this site (which i love very much), when boiled down, the main advantage of wpf are :

  • binding controls to properties in xaml.
  • binding commands to command objects in the viewmodel.

the first feature is easy to implement (in code), or with a generic control binder, which binds all the controls in the form.

the second feature is a little harder to implement, but if you inherit from all your controls and add a command property (which is triggered by an internal event such as click), which is binded to a command instance in the ViewModel.

The challenges I'm currently aware of are :

  • implementing a commandmanager, (which will trigger the CanInvoke method of the commands as necessery.
  • winforms only supports one level of databinding : datasource, datamember, wpf is much more flexible.

am i missing any other major features that winforms lacks in comparison with wpf, when attempting to implement this design pattern?

i sure many of you will recommend some sort of MVP pattern, but MVVM/Presentation model is the way to go for me, because I'll want future WPF support.

Thanks in advance, Erik.

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