WPF MVVM and Drug Dealers

I have just finished reading up the first three chapters of the In The Box MVVM Training. The training series use a very innovative delivery approach. All the material, code and solution reference are integrated into Visual Studio. In that way there is very little time wasted in flipping through code, samples, or try running applications as it is all “In the box”. Really good stuff.

Initially the MVVM pattern could be a little difficult to grasp especially for a very green developer like me. However, I have my “eureka” moment which is really interesting as I could find a very bizarre analogy which I really understand.

As a guy grow up in Hong Kong watching Hong Kong ganster movies, I have some understand about how drug dealers operate. They have people who is responsible for receiving drugs from high power speed boat (big fly in Chines). People who move the incoming stock into the workshop for further processing and packing, and then people for distribution.

All these different people needs to communicate with each other, but never met and know each other. They will use prepaid SIM (space card in chinese), pager, untraceable IM accounts etc to communicate with each other, they will never meet each other or have any knowledge of the people before and after the supply chain. This reduce the risk of being traced by police and undercovers (two five boy in Chinese).

WPF with MVVM is exactly this. Each layer don’t know each other. They operate by using loosely coupled communication channel. All they know is the protocol but not the name. If one of them disappear, it can still work (highly testable!)

OK, just to share an interesting view on this subject. Got to get back reading during the weekend, cheers!

Great MVVM Pattern Resource

Have already read alot on Model-View-View Model (MVVM) and some Prism, but still find this WPF MVVM Developer Series by Miguel A. Castro really useful.

The pace is eay to follow, the screen is reasonably clear, the audio is clear enough to me, the speaker really know the stuff and focused.

Without diving into the methology first the speaker explains the purpose behind MVVM, which is to make the UI layer state driven. This makes it really clear it is not about methology like how to use or not use code behind or view model.

It will be great if a similar series on Prism is available.

(Update) There is indeed a great course In a Box created by, who else, Kark Shifflett on both MVVM and Prism which is really cool.

Do you know any great Prsim resources you could share with us here?