WPF and Silverlight enablers
.NET 3.0 introduced new toolkits for thick and thin client development, which included Silverlight for thin client development and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for thick client development. At the heart of these new frameworks were features that allowed for much greater separation of concerns, including the following:
A rich data binding system
A commanding infrastructure
Support for data templates
A rich styling system
We will cover these features shortly, but for now it's important to know that these features in WPF and Silverlight made MVVM a practical reality as it provided the framework support needed for separating the view state and view logic from the view without requiring the overhead of writing property objects or using view interfaces.
There are many areas in the framework that could be improved to better support MVVM, and my guess would be that we will be seeing the road map for WPF and Silverlight incorporate more of the techniques and tools...
