MVVM is a proven design pattern in WFP/Silverlight world. Its use helps achieve separation of concerns, frees UI from any logic to enhance testing, and generally makes the code easier to understand and maintain. In many LOB multi-tier applications MVVM is extended to include a presenter class. Presenter usually controls the view model, receives necessary services from dependency injection container and has some logic to populate the view model with business entities and/or reference data and send any changes back. The resulting code is usually pretty clean, easy to maintain and test. This article argues though that most of the code in such presenters to populate the view models is also very mechanical, routine, boring and can be avoided all together by introducing small attribute-based view model framework to declaratively populate view models from service calls and avoid extra coding, and, thus, avoid writing extra mechanical, routine, and boring tests.

If you prefer the “code first” approach VS 2008 solution can be downloaded here: MVVMAttributes.zip

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