Question

I read this article today http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/silverlight/Silverlight-3-and-the-Data-Form-Control-part-I.aspx about the use of the MVVM pattern within a silverlight app where you have your domain entities and view spesific entities which basically is a subset of the real entity objects. Isn’t this a clear violation of the DRY principle? and if so how can you deal with it in a nice way?

Answer 1

Personally, I don’t like what Dino’s doing there and I wouldn’t approach the problem the same way. I usually think of a VM as a filtered, grouped and sorted collections of Model classes. A VM to me is a direct mapping to the View, so I might create a NewOrderViewModel class that has multiple CollectionViews used by the View (maybe one CV for Customers and another CV for Products, probably both filtered). Creating an entirely new VM class for every class in the Model does violate DRY in my opinion. I would rather use derivation or partial classes to augment the Model where necessary, adding in View specific (often calculated) properties. IMO .NET RIA Services is an excellent implementation of combining M and VM data with the added bonus that it’s usable in on both the client and the server. Dino’s a brilliant guy, but way to call him out on this one.