Programming Articles

Through this article series, you've created several .NET MAUI pages, performed navigation, used data binding, and worked with the MVVM and DI design patterns. As you created your view models, you've set information and exception message properties. In this article, you'll build reusable components to display information, error, and validation messages on your pages. To validate user input, you're going to use data annotation attributes such as [Required] and [Range]. With just a little generic code, you can add validation to your .NET MAUI applications and display the error messages from these data annotation attributes. Sometimes you require a pop-up dialog to ask the user a question, get a little piece of data, or maybe just provide some information to the user. There are a few different dialogs you can use in .NET MAUI and you'll start this article by exploring these.

In this article series, you've created several .NET MAUI pages, created a top-level menu system, and programmatically navigated between pages. Using data binding greatly reduces the amount of code you need to write. Using the MVVM and DI design patterns helps you create applications that are reusable, maintainable, and testable. In this article, you'll display lists of data and navigate from a list item to the detail page for that item. .NET MAUI provides ListView, CollectionView, and CarouselView controls for displaying lists. Each list control is illustrated, and you're provided with guidance on what each control is best at displaying.

Up to this point in this article series on .NET MAUI, you created a set of typical business application input pages and learned about the many different controls you can use for data input. Data binding is a great feature of .NET MAUI to help you eliminate C# code in your applications. In this article, you'll learn the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) and Dependency Injection (DI) design patterns to create reusable, maintainable, and testable applications. You'll learn to eliminate code in your code-behind by taking advantage of Commanding. You'll also learn how to apply Commanding while keeping your various components reusable across other types of applications. Finally, you'll learn how to keep your MauiProgram class maintainable by employing extension methods.

In this final part of this article series, you build a product detail page to add and edit product data. You add a delete button on the list page to remove a product from the database. You learn to validate product data and display validation messages to the user. Finally, you learn to cancel out of an add or edit page, bypassing validation and returning to the product list page.

In this article, you're going to add on to the sample from the last article to sort the database when the user clicks on any of the column headers in the HTML table. You're going to learn how to add a pager to your HTML table so only a specified number of rows are displayed on the page. Finally, you learn to cache the product data in the Session object to improve performance.

This article presents how to use the Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) design pattern in MVC Core applications. The MVVM approach has long been used in WPF applications but hasn't been as prevalent in MVC or MVC Core applications. This article illustrates how using MVVM in MVC makes your applications even more reusable, testable, and maintainable. You're going to be guided step-by-step building an MVC Core application using the Entity Framework (EF) and a view model class to display and search for product data.

Have you found that you can understand the basics of data binding in WPF and Silverlight, but when you start to read about Model-View-View-Model (MVVM) you find that you have been dropped off a cliff? Have you looked at some of the XAML frameworks like PRISM only to find that it is just way too complicated for what you need? If this sounds familiar, then don't worry, you are not alone. Many great programmers struggle with this every day. In my humble opinion, I say don't try to implement a pure MVVM model. Just keep it simple! Many times the simplest approach is the best.