Andrew Connell

DevExpress CodeRush Templates for Silverlight MVVM Development

I’ve made secret about the fact I’m a huge fan of DevExpress ’ Visual Studio productivity tools CodeRush & Refactor! Pro . A Visual Studio 2010 install isn’t complete until these guys are running. One thing I love about CodeRush is the code expansion templates. I built a bunch of these for SharePoint developers to help with all the XML we have to write back in the pre-Visual Studio 2010 days. Thankfully most of it is redundant now due to the great improvements we got with first class developer tools for SharePoint in Visual Studio 2010.

Lately I’ve been doing a bunch of work with Silverlight. When doing Silverlight development, I am a proponent of the MVVM design pattern , specifically the MVVM Light Toolkit . Laurent Bugnion , the author behind the MVVM Light Toolkit includes a handful of Visual Studio 2010 code snippets to help you along. I’m not much of a fan of the VS2010 snippets so I created a few CodeRush code expansion templates.

The three I created are MVVMLP for a locator property in the ViewModeleLocator class, MVVMBP for a bindable property in the view model & MVVMDP for a dependency property. You can download the templates from the Critical Path Training Members section (you must be logged in to download it, but accounts are free to create). Look for AC’s MVVM CodeRush Templates in the Code Samples section. I’ll update the ZIP as needed.

Want to see how they work? Check these animated GIF’s:

MVVMBP - Bindable Property (for MVVM Light Toolkit)

MVVMDP - Dependency Property

MVVMLP - Locator Property (for MVVM Light Toolkit)

Andrew Connell
Developer & Chief Course Artisan, Voitanos LLC. | Microsoft MVP
Written by Andrew Connell

Andrew Connell is a web developer with a focus on Microsoft Azure & Microsoft 365. He’s received Microsoft’s MVP award every year since 2005 and has helped thousands of developers through the various courses he’s authored & taught. Andrew’s the founder of Voitanos and is dedicated to delivering industry-leading on-demand video training to professional developers. He lives with his wife & two kids in Florida.