Silverlight 4 design-time features for ViewModels

Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 offer a lot of new features. I like all the new features but I was especially interested in improvements that could help my current developments which are based on a M-V-VM architecture with ViewModels and a lot of bindings with UI controls. So I wrote an article and published it on my personal website. The article will focus on the improved design-time features. Along the way I will show a lot of screenshots and try to cover some other new Silverlight 4 features.

• Domain entities and WCF RIA Services
• Base classes and ViewModel interface and implementation
  • ViewModel interface
  • ViewModelBase class
  • DelegateCommand class
  • ProductViewModel class
• XAML designer
• Design-time properties
  • DesignWidth and DesignHeight
  • DataContext and DesignInstance
• Properties window and databinding
  • TextBox
  • Button and Command
  • ListBox
  • DataGrid
• Showing data in Design-time
  • Design-time ViewModel
  • IsDesignTimeCreatable
• Other Silverlight 4 DataBinding improvements
  • String indexers
  • Dependency Objects
  • StringFormat & TextTrimming
• Data Sources window