Wednesday, April 28, 2010

model-view-viewmodel for the designer developer workflow

Almost all of my projects involve the designer/developer workflow to a certain degree (even if I end up doing both roles!) and the UK Solutions Delivery team has spent a number of years developing best practice for this style of work.

There’s a range of skill sets in this area from designers who hand over designs in PhotoShop files, to developers who work completely in C# and never touch XAML or the UI design.

The Designer/Developer workflow focuses on people who fall between these extremes. WPF and Silverlight, with the use of Blend, lend themselves very well to this method of working and the UK UX team practices and supports it on a daily basis.

I was introduced to the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern shortly before beginning work on the Eye on Earth project. As it was a user centric agile project, it made sense to use MVVM.
What is MVVM?

Model-View-ViewModel is a design pattern used in Silverlight and WPF development to assist the designer/developer workflow. It separates the UI, control and data further than using XAML and code-behind files does, aiming to provide a consistent and flexible project structure. MVVM is also geared towards UI unit testing as the layers can be separated to test upon.

Read more: stu-art :: Dev to UX

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