Last night was the regularly scheduled meeting for the Madison .Net Users Group and consisted of a presentation on MVVM by Christopher Huganen, and the first meeting of the TFS SIG, led by Travis Feirtag.

MVVM

MVVM stands for Model, View, View Model, and is an architectural pattern that focuses on testability and separation of concerns. While MVVM can be used in a variety of application environments, the focus of this presentation was on it’s use with WPF. As a matter of fact, I’m seeing MVVM paired specifically with WPF more and more.

Some key advantages of MVVM that were talked about include:

• Separation of Concerns
• Use the force of WPF (bindings)
• Write less code
• Easy to Unit test
• Split Designer/Developer responsibilities

To the inexperienced WPF developer (which includes myself), it may seem difficult to believe that MVVM leads to writing less code. At first glance, and from reviewing numerous (short) examples, it basically looks like you are rewriting your business entity class, but adding support for binding and other View concerns. I believe that overall it will lead to less code, but I can’t comment directly on it until I actually implement something using this pattern (which I hope to start soon).

Here are a few links that were provided last night that talk more about the MVVM pattern:

• MSDN Article - WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern written by Josh Smith
• Karl Shifflett's blog and section of MVVM

And for the sake of completeness, here are a couple of definitions for some similar patterns.

• Supervising Presenter
• Passive View

TFS

As I mentioned in my opening, last night was the first meeting of the TFS SIG. Travis put together a short slide deck outlining the purpose of the SIG (TFS SIG Slides), and also brought an external hard drive with a VPC image containing TFS 2008 and Team Suite 2008 (running on top of Win2k3 Server).

• VPC Image
• Hyper-V Image

I am really excited about participating in the TFS SIG, as TFS is something I started, but I guess you could say never finished. So in addition to the labs and topics covered initially at the SIG, I’m hoping to start a project with the purpose of better understanding TFS from the project management point of view.

Here are some links to some of the things I brought up during the SIG portion of the meeting (and a few other links):

• My blog posts (part1, part2) on migrating from TFS 2005 to 2008 Beta, which covers migrating between domains and servers
• TFS Branching Guide 2.0
• MSBuild Extension Pack
• SvnBridge - Use TortoiseSVN with Team Foundation Server
• http://localhost:8080/Warehouse/v1.0/warehousecontroller.asmx – This is the URL to the warehouse controller web service in TFS. From here you can manually invoke the warehouse update job so you can get updated reports. Also great for trouble shooting.

MVC

After the meeting I got to talking with a couple of people about Asp.Net MVC and promised a couple of links:

• Jeff Palermo's Blog
• http://www.codeplex.com/MVCContrib
• Code Camp Server – A “reference” application built using Asp.Net MVC, TDD and DDD.