As posted earlier by Brian Prince and Stephen Giffin, the MVC4WPF project will be launched to CodePlex on Thursday. We will be having a spash at the Columbus Microsoft office in the morning - if you would like to attend, please RSVP here. I'm actually quite proud to be involved in this effort,, even if jsut as a tester and tech writer. The thought that went into this product is very impressive. If you are doing large WPF projects you certainly owe it to yourself to check it out.
A little about MVC (from the Developer Guide): Model-View-Controller is a pattern for software development. It doesn't provide development tools of its own, but is rather an agreed-upon way to go about developing software. It builds upon the concept that divides the basic functions of a contemporary application into component parts:
- The model, which represents the underlying data;
- the view, which represents what the user sees; and,
- the controller, which manages the business logic and communication between the view and the model.
The three parts of the software communicate with the use of agreed upon contracts that define communication between the parts, and property bags that hold configuration values and data objects.
MVC works well with WPF because Microsoft has done some of the heavy listing for us in the division-of-duties arena. Like ASP.NET, the View code is physically segregated into a code file all its own with hte XAML file (ASP.NET of course uses the ASPX file). This basic architectural decision makes things appropriate for MVC.
MVC4WPF has a ton of automation to make development much simpler than many other MVC environments. It is appropriate for junior developers, and is very forgiving to work with. It is rather open ended, and will cut you if you don't read the recommended usage. The project will come with a boatload of documentation (some of which I wrote) that will help a lot.
Keep an eye on the codeplex site, and come on up Thursday if you get the chance to see what I am talking about. Should be a good time.