Part 6. Best practices

Throughout this book, I’ve shown you a mixture of patterns for building applications. Sometimes, I used code-behind, other times a view model or similar pattern. In each case, it was a conscious decision where I weighed the best practices against how they’d help (or not help) convey the key concepts for that example. Now, it’s time for us to turn to best practices and some of the advanced techniques used in Silverlight development.

First, you’ll explore the popular Model-View-ViewModel pattern (MVVM). This is a powerful but simple pattern that helps keep the user interface separated from the logic in your application.

Then, because complex applications are...umm...complex, you’ll look at debugging. Debugging and instrumenting your applications is an important part of the development and support process.

Part 6 examines the install experience and use of preloaders. These often-overlooked parts of the development of a Silverlight application are essential if you want end users to have a favorable impression from their very first click.