MVVM Survival Guide for Enterprise Architectures in Silverlight and WPF

History of presentational patterns

In this section we will cover the history of presentational (or GUI) patterns. Presentational patterns have been around for over 30 years and a full coverage of all the various patterns is outside of the scope of this book. We will instead focus on two of the major trends that have emerged over the last 30 years and look at how those two trends eventually evolved to MVVM for Silverlight and WPF.

Note

If you are interested in learning more about the history of presentational patterns than what is covered here, then see Martin Fowler's article GUI Architectures (http://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/uiArchs.html).

Monolithic design

Enterprise applications deal with displaying, manipulating, and saving data. If we build enterprise ...