As a way to learn a new technology, I find one of the best approaches is to actually sit down with an existing application and build on top of it. This is what I am going to share with you to hopefully help you learn more about Silverlight and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel).
Tim Heuer created an excellent set of blog posts showing how to create the TwitterSearchMonitor application. Having run through this some time ago, I thought it would be a good exercise to take this simple application and move it forward to be unit tested along with being developed using the MVVM pattern. Quick disclaimer…
I am not an MVVM guru, I am a technology guy learning and sharing my way through the maze of a relatively new technology stack. I will make mistakes, I will develop things that other people might not think right. It does not matter – this is simply an approach, follow it if you like and feel free to send me feedback.
I will break this down into a number of (hopefully) easily digestible posts so please check back to see how these progress over the coming weeks. Here is a draft break down of the series:
- Part 1 – Introduction and project setup
- Part 2 – The first ViewModel with unit testing and mocks
- Part 3 – Developing and Integration testing our Service
- Part 4 – Adding the rest of the functionality
- Part 5 – Wrap-up