Advice needed - connecting MainPage with sub Views

Question

Hi

Can someone please give me some advice as to the 'best' structure for my current programming issue. Currently we have an application with a MainPage that consists of a Main and Sub Toolbar and a Content Frame - the frame is used to show the many different views that are accessed from a menu sitting in the Main Toolbar on the MainPage. Every time a new view is loaded the main page needs to consider the View's DataContext to determine which of many different dropdowns, selectors on the MainPage Sub Toolbar etc to show/hide. At the moment the way we handle this is to check the View's datacontext in the Navigated event in the MainPage.xaml.cs and modify the MainPage accordingly.

I would like to change this for a number of reasons:

(a) it relies on each View having had its datacontext already initialized before the Navigated event runs - as we start to use the MEF Import/Export approach more and more this no longer holds true;

(b) it seems to me to be too 'tightly coupled' and I'd like to improve/overhaul it sooner rather than later

Can anyone advise as to best practice and offer any links to similar examples?

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi,

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff921163(v=PandP.40).aspx

Answer 2

Can anyone advise as to best practice and offer any links to similar examples?

Here's another interesting video: http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/matthijs/silverlight-4-a-guided-tour-of-the-managed-extensibility-framework-mef

Peter