Over the past few months I’ve been researching, writing and speaking about MVVM quite a lot. One of the teaching tools I’ve developed has turned out to be useful for both teaching and actually building applications. This is the Bxf (Basic XAML Framework) code I’ve developed.

I must confess, I have little interest in becoming a UI framework author. But I also recognize that you can’t do any UI pattern like MVVM (or MVC) without some minimal framework support – there’s just some plumbing code you must have for the pattern to be actually useful.

Bxf is the minimum set of functionality I’ve been able to identify to support MVVM, with a couple other key goals:

1. Support MVVM so a developer only creates a View, ViewModel and Model
2. Same functionality/code in Silverlight and WPF
3. Zero code-behind the XAML – any UI code goes in the viewmodel, and binding/commanding/trigger actions are used to allow the view to interact with the viewmodel
4. Enable the use of the Visual Studio 2010 XAML designer (“Cider”), most notably the drag-and-drop data binding support it provides
5. Enable the use of Expression Blend

I’ve included Bxf in some samples from the Visual Studio 2010 launch and for CSLA 4. But I’ve decided that’s too random, so I created http://bxf.codeplex.com to house the code.

My hope is that other people who find Bxf useful might choose to join the project as contributors and extend it to be more broadly useful. However, I also hope that the framework remains extremely simple and minimalistic (since there are already several quite robust and complex frameworks out there for people who need more than a simple solution can offer).