That is a symbolic milestone: Last week, MVVM Light reached the bar of 120’000 downloads on http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com, the site that has been hosting source and installers since the beginning of the project (100'000 downloads) and on Nuget, the popular package manager for .NET (20'000 downloads). More information about Nuget and MVVM Light.
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Expression Studio V4!
MVVM Light started its “career” on Codeplex in October 2009. Back then it was intended as a set of classes I could use when blogging about MVVM, to avoid having to repeat the same concepts over and over again. These ideas were born from discussions on the WPF disciples mailing list (now renamed to “XAML disciples”), a group of friends who talks about everything and anything and occasionally about coding. In fact in some cases some code was even stolen borrowed with appreciation from some of the individuals on this list. Since then of course, the code has evolved, driven by requests from the community. I have a lot of appreciation for everyone who helps, and for the many interesting discussions around MVVM and other coding concepts.
I remember one discussion (in a sauna in Seattle, of all places) with my friend Josh Smith about what I wanted to achieve with MVVM Light. Back then I told him that my goal was to have this side project, but that I didn’t intend to let it grow too big. I can say with confidence that I failed big time: MVVM Light is taking a lot of my free time, but what a reward!
Multiple platforms
MVVM Light is available these days for Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, Silverlight 5, WPF3.5, WPF4, Windows Phone, WinRT (Windows 8). I know for a fact that it is running into many Windows Phone applications (MVVM Light for WP7 was released within a few days from every major version of Windows Phone).
Lesser known fact, MVVM Light is also running on XBOX: At the end of last year, a lot of new applications were released for this platform. The applications are XAML based, and MVVM Light was chosen as the framework of choice to build these applications. There is no obligation, but this is driving adoption of MVVM Light in the living room!
Of course Windows 8 is also supported. Here too, MVVM Light was available within a few days from the major releases (developer preview, customer preview) and that will continue. I have the chance to have people within Microsoft who are using MVVM Light and helping me with issues, again it is a great pleasure to have this collaboration.
An amazing community
If like me you follow the #mvvmlight tag on Twitter, you will see that many people worldwide are using it. I love to see tweets about it in all kinds of languages (in fact if I would love to travel to all the places where it is used :)
I also receive many more emails than I can handle. I really do my best to answer everything, sometimes with a delay, but I fail. If you have sent me an email and it was not answered, please accept my sincere apologies. It’s simply too much to handle. On the other hand, if you have technical questions, make sure to post the on StackOverflow with the tag "mvvm-light"!! Questions there are rarely left unanswered, and I am also checking them out from time to time. Crowdsourcing the tech support has probably been one of the best decisions I ever made in this project!
Things I would like to do (or to have done differently)
Not everything is perfect in this project, by far. There are a few things I really would like to do better, and some thing I would like to have done differently.
First, the documentation: This is an oft-heard comment and it is true, there isn’t a structure documentation concept. There are however many many articles by MVVM Light enthusiasts, but I agree that for a beginner it can be a daunting task to find their way through all the information. So yes, this is still a big project and a big plan, I want to have a solid documentation concept. When? Well that is the big question, because that takes a lot of time. The balance between coding and documenting is really not easy. That said, the whole source code is documented, so at least that is clean :)
Another thing I regret is that I took over too many new features and bug fixes in V4. Because of that the gap between V3 and V4 was much too long. I will change that in the next version, and release true RTM versions more often.
V4 and then?
These days I was busy releasing V4 release candidate (RC) to Codeplex (source), Nuget and to create an MSI installer. I will give a couple of weeks to the RC just to catch last minutes bugs (if available) and make a few minor adjustments. It means that V4 will definitely be released in the next few weeks.
And then… well then I want to tackle a few things: more documentation, and starting to work on V5. I also have a couple of applications for the phone and for Windows 8 that I would love to finalize. I guess that rest is for the dead, eh? ;)
Again, I want to thank everyone who sends me messages of support through the years. I could not have done all this without the moral help of the community.
Celebration
To celebrate this milestone, I am giving away two copies of Expression Studio 4 Ultimate (includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, Expression Design, Expression Encoder Pro and Expression Web+Superpreview). This is a value of 599 USD each!
Not only you will have a chance to win this for as little as 10 USD, but in addition the whole proceeds of this auction will be sent to the humanitarian organization Calcutta Rescue. I have many ties with this organization and I was even president of the Swiss organization (in charge of gathering funds in Switzerland) for quite a few years. In 2007, I had the chance to visit the projects personally and I can attest that they are extremely well managed. You can see pictures of this visit on my Flickr page.
In order to participate, follow the easy step:
On May 29th, I will block the counters and will randomly pick two winners for the Expression Studio copies. Winners will be notified per email and the prizes sent by standard mail. I will personally ensure that the funds are sent to Calcutta Rescue by the intermediary of the Swiss organization Calcutta Espoir, whose sole purpose is to gather funds in Switzerland for the Indian NGO.
I count on you, awesome MVVM Light community, to make this action a success! See you on May 29th to announce the winners!
Cheers
Laurent
Print | posted on Sunday, April 29, 2012 9:05 PM