Is MVVM pointless?
- by joebeazelman
Is orthodox MVVM implementation pointless? I am creating a new application and I considered Windows Forms and WPF. I chose WPF because it's future-proof and offer lots of flexibility. There is less code and easier to make significant changes to your UI using XAML.
Since the choice for WPF is obvious, I figured that I may as well go all the way by using MVVM as my application architecture since it offers blendability, separation concerns and unit testability. Theoretically, it seems beautiful like the holy grail of UI programming. This brief adventure; however, has turned into a real headache.
As expected in practice, I’m finding that I’ve traded one problem for another. I tend to be an obsessive programmer in that I want to do things the right way so that I can get the right results and possibly become a better programmer. The MVVM pattern just flunked my test on productivity and has just turned into a big yucky hack!
The clear case in point is adding support for a Modal dialog box. The correct way is to put up a dialog box and tie it to a view model. Getting this to work is difficult. In order to benefit from the MVVM pattern, you have to distribute code in several places throughout the layers of your application. You also have to use esoteric programming constructs like templates and lamba expressions. Stuff that makes you stare at the screen scratching your head. This makes maintenance and debugging a nightmare waiting to happen as I recently discovered. I had an about box working fine until I got an exception the second time I invoked it, saying that it couldn’t show the dialog box again once it is closed. I had to add an event handler for the close functionality to the dialog window, another one in the IDialogView implementation of it and finally another in the IDialogViewModel. I thought MVVM would save us from such extravagant hackery!
There are several folks out there with competing solutions to this problem and they are all hacks and don’t provide a clean, easily reusable, elegant solution. Most of the MVVM toolkits gloss over dialogs and when they do address them, they are just alert boxes that don’t require custom interfaces or view models.
I’m planning on giving up on the MVVM view pattern, at least its orthodox implementation of it. What do you think? Has it been worth the trouble for you if you had any? Am I just a incompetent programmer or does MVVM not what it's hyped up to be?
