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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-24T01:54:26+00:00

I am building a WPF app that is based on the MVVM pattern (using

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I am building a WPF app that is based on the MVVM pattern (using MVVM Light). It has an outer “shell” to it that gives the main look to the app (status bar, etc.) and then all the content is contained in various user controls that I swap out with the Telerik RadTransitionControl. My two questions related to this are as follows:

  1. I am building my ViewModels using the ViewModelLocator part for Blendability purposes. This involves a basic static class that returns a new instance of a ViewModel for binding and instances are essentially shared as long as the app is running. The question for this is whether I should use a concept such as a “ViewLocator” in that it is a static class that has a static property for all of my views (the app has ~10 so it’s not huge) and when I need to transition to a new view I just pull from the static set. The pros of this are ease of use, but are there cons? Is there a better way to pursue this?

  2. What is the best way to transition views? Currently I am passing an enum to my shell view (via messaging) to indicate which view I need, but this seems really hacky and doesn’t support passing certain views arguments. I toyed with a custom class, but I would almost need a different one for every view and it seemed like it might be overkill. What is the standard practice executed by WPF devs for this process?

Thanks in advance for the help. I’m fairly new to WPF so I want to make sure I learn the industry standards and avoid hacks wherever possible.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I work on an application that uses the same pattern. We have a static locator and reference the same ViewModel every time we switch to a different part of the application (details view, list view, map view, etc.) We have had a lot of success with the ViewModelLocator pattern – it is pretty easy to understand. We have not done significant testing with running the application for multiple hours.

    We use a TabControl with the tab styling removed to transition between the main screens of the application. This gives us one point of entry (the selected index property that we bind on the “naked” Tabcontrol) to change the major screens of the application. For now, we do not use animations.

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