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I have heard that there are issues with a lot of 3rd party WPF control being designed to enable programming by someone with a WinForms mind-set and hence not supporting MVVM well.

Is this a real issue?

Are any of the main WPF control vendors better on this?

(As often a 3rd party control set needs to be chosen before the programmers on a project are up to speed on WPF/MVVM, just getting an eval of the control sets is not enough)

Ian Ringrose
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I have used both Telerik and DeveExpress in MVVM and Telerik has by far the best support for MVVM. They provide a consistant API through out the control set as well as excelent command support. What was even more important for me was that they had great support for Prisim out of the box. Devexpress was quirky and inconsistant and offered no support for Prisim.

BRaul
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  • Had you used any of the control set from WinForm or Web before moving to WPF? – Ian Ringrose Jul 07 '11 at 14:26
  • I agree with you 100% on Telerik they definitely do a great job at making the controls work well within the target environment...as convenience they also provide good support for say someone who uses their winforms controls to transition to their WPF controls as well. – Michael Brown Jul 07 '11 at 15:05
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We use Infragistics for Silverlight, and have found that its support for MVVM is mixed. A couple of specific things we've found:

  • You can bind a grid's row collection, and you can bind the contents of the cells, but you can't bind the column collection -- so if you ever have dynamic columns (as we do), you have to resort to code-behind.
  • You have to do some exotic trickery to get their tree to show an arbitrary-depth hierarchy, since by default they want to have a different template for each level of the tree.

With some research, some attached behaviors, and some codebehind, Infragistics is usable from MVVM (as long as you aren't a purist who insists that MVVM means "no codebehind ever"). But it doesn't feel like it was really designed for the WPF/Silverlight way of doing things.

Joe White
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