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0 pointswhoisthemachine10y ago0 comments

I don't know, I've done both (Silverlight MVVM and Winforms) plenty and I prefer the manual approach. Databinding is cool until you have any sort of complexity in your app, and then it becomes unwieldy quickly.

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mariusmg10y ago

Databinding (and MVVM by extension) is ok only in very simple scenarios. Once you hit some complexity you end up in a world of hurt.

Databinding is not a leaky abstraction ,it's a fucking flood abstraction.

stupidcar10y ago

Um, if you're using MVVM, then by definition you should have a clean separation between the properties of your Model, which is part of your domain, and the properties of your View-Model, which is part of your presentation tier and directly tied to a particular View. If you have this, what exactly can be leaked by databinding? The only things you're binding to should be properties of your View-Model.

icegreentea10y ago

While that's largely true when dealing with pure business logic, there's a maddeningly large amount of UI logic, and hybrid business/UI logic that becomes really annoying (or outright impossible) to handle in pure MVVM with WPF. Reasons for this include that many user interface properties aren't exposed nicely to allow data-binding.

Probably the most infamous one is that the WPF listview with multiple select enabled doesn't allow you to bind to the collection of selected items. Instead you have to do all sorts of work arounds, that while individually aren't too bad, when put all together, makes all the other hard work you put into doing MVVM on the components that you fully control super frustrating.

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m_fayer10y ago

I've worked on large and complex apps with MVVM in WPF and on the web with Angular, and have not regretted using MVVM for a second.

Databinding is indeed a leaky abstraction, but at the same time it's a very powerful one. I'm willing to learn the inner workings of the binding system to avoid performance pitfalls and other weirdnesses. I'm also willing to continually wrap all sorts of not MVVM-ready components to make them data-binding friendly. When people talk about databinding being a leaky abstraction, what I hear is "I was promised magic and it's not actually magical."

Also - there's many different approaches to how it's done with various tradeoffs. Compiled bindings on Android and the new Windows platforms look interesting, and you should also check out how ReactiveUI approaches it.

In the end though, I've never been able to achieve a satisfactory level of loose coupling, testability, and portability without databinding. Despite the overhead and occasional surprises, it's paid off in spades as far as quality and productivity.

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