Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft)

The new version of the MVVM Light Toolkit was just posted. So what is new? Well, to be honest not much.

• The biggest change is the new installer. It is now a standalone MSI installer, because some of you reported some issues with the previous ClickOnce based setup. I personally liked the ClickOnce setup (and I got a few good comments about it), but of course a standalone, offline installer is more versatile, so be it :)
• The following shortcuts are created in Start / All programs / Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) / MVVM Light Toolkit:
  • A shortcut to the locally installed source code.
  • A shortcut to the locally installed binaries (DLLs).
  • A shortcut to the Get Started web page online.
• You can change the paths of the files and the installation type (WPF, SL or both) by executing the MVVM Light Toolkit setup and choosing the “repair” option. This is useful if you change the settings of Visual Studio for some reason.
• Corrected a bug in the ViewModelBase.IsInDesignMode property. This property returns true when the code (XAML or C#) is executed inside a design tool such as Expression Blend or Visual Studio. The bug and the solution are exposed in a previous blog post.
• The ViewModelBase class implements IDisposable now. This is a scenario that occurs very often so it makes sense to make it the default. View Models can override the Dispose(bool) method if needed to clean up their resources.
• Added two snippets for WPF and two for Silverlight. These new snippets create an attached property or a dependency property using a constant as the property name. This makes it easier to handle the name and to avoid “magic strings”.
  • mvvmpropa creates an attached property for WPF.
  • mvvmpropdp creates a dependency property for WPF.
  • mvvmslpropa creates an attached property for Silverlight.
  • mvvmslpropdp creates a dependency property for Silverlight.
• Changed a few implementation details in the Project Template to make the creation and deletion of View Models cleaner.

That’s all for now. From today I will be working on the next version with a few interesting features added to the toolkit, and a few changes in the interface to make it even easier to use the MVVM Light Toolkit and create your MVVM applications in WPF and in Silverlight!

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