Building Enterprise Applications with Windows® Presentation Foundation and the Model View ViewModel Pattern [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

If you are looking for in-depth and thorough coverage of MVVM, then I would say look elsewhere. If you are looking for a good introductory overview of the Line of Business applications, then this book is for you.

O'reilly had the book listed at 250 pages, Amazon at 224. Including the index it is at 201, so it is a very short read. On the other hand, it is a very cheap book.

I liked that the tools used in examples where Microsoft tools. The open source tools where introduced, but Microsoft tools where also introduced. For example Unity and Entity Framework where introduced in the book. A lot of books nowadays only introduce the open source tools available.

I found the patterns examples in the Overview of Patterns tables a little silly. Flyweight Example: A=FWFactory.Get("A"); That is it.... Uhm?

Although the book is very short it hits on a lot of topics. Most are presented with a simple example and you gain a basic understanding of the topic.

The book does do a good job of introducing the key elements in a Line of Business application. Will this be the only book you need to start developing enterprise level applications, no. It will however introduce you to the concepts you need to understand in order to build them. From their you have the option of going and learning more about them. It does do a good job of putting them all together for you in the right context.

It does a decent job of introducing MVVM, but I feel it is in the title to sell more books. The book could have just been titled "An Introduction to building Line of Business Applications with .NET".

At the time of this review there is no code available for download. Although the author has blogged that it is on the way.

At the price it is being sold for I definitely feel the book is worth checking out. Especially for those developers that have not had a chance to familiarize themselves with the tools the .NET Framework offers for building Line of Business applications.

The title looks promising and has the "Enterprise Application" slogan as a very important thing (whatever enterprise application means in those days). The book promises some very ambitious points like:

Dive deep into MVVM
Build a simple Customer Relationship Management application
Create a Domain Model
Write dynamic code for data access with the Entity Framework
Enforce complex data and validation scenarios with Workflow Foundation 4
Implement MVVM using Prism

The book started tyring to explain what is the MVVM pattern and its relation with Line of Business Applications (LOBs) and how MVVM and Composite Application patterns relate themselves to solve LOB's problems... For some reason in this chapter the author starts telling you now about separation of concerns and three tiering and layering... (you know I don't like how people uses the term "layered application"). For some reason in this chapter also introduce Expression Blend and how a LOB is composed (in things like Menu, Toolbar, Ribbon, etc...) weird... I know...

In the chapter two we read about what is a pattern, mention common patterns and try to explain the different Presentation Patterns (MVC, MVVM, MVP). In this chapter the author introduce concepts like IoC using Unity and differences between Unity and MEF (well, good to know). After this is never late to talk about Fluent Interfaces and DSLs and how to do unit testing... Yeah...

After all of this the author start talking about Domain Modeling, and Domain Driven Design... yeah, but wait a minute... why he started talking about the relation between DDD Domains and Layering? what? if you are a DDD fan like me beware of this chapter, the author is just confused about DDD/Layering (damn, I don't like that word!) and how to represent an object in a pure domain approach.

Later chapters are about Data Access Layer (and how the author relate it with DDD and the domain logic), the Business Layer (and how to represent domain validation rules in Workflow Foundation 4) and the book end with a chapter about creating an UI layer with all those concepts toghether. Something really bothered me was the sample code for the UI Layer with MVVM chapter, you just learn about the existence for the WPF Ribbon Control from Codeplex, that's all...

Personally the only chapter I liked was the last chapter about MVVM frameworks and toolkits, he just mention those frameworks but some of them were totally new to my knowledge.

I must say the true, I will give only one start to this book, if you like code, this is not a book for you, if you like a good set of samples and the reason behind the facts, this book is not for you, if you want to learn how to use Prism and MVVM, this book is not for you either (it only mentions Prism and how it relates to MVVM), if you want to learn how to implement your applications using MVVM pattern, this book is not for you... really...

If you want to know what is MVVM and in some way how it relates with some other concepts (sometimes not really related at all but well, what do I know?) maybe this book is for you (but anyway you can get those concepts for free in the internet too) or if you have some hours to spare and someone give you that book for free maybe this book would be a choice.

I know talk about MVVM in just 200 pages must be a hard work, so nice trying...

This is a mere 200 pages and only the last 50 are about MVVM. Given how big those letters are on the cover, I was expecting more. It's mostly general recommendations with very little in the way of specific examples. There's much better info available on the web for free.