Last Wednesday night, I attended a talk at RockNUG on MVVM by Joel Cochran. It’s the best explanation of the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern that I’ve seen so far. I found his talk particularly useful because he focused on the fundamentals of the design pattern instead of a specific framework (of which there are many).
Cochran’s talk was good for second and completely unexpected reason–his use of Mercurial for his code demos. I’ve been to my share of conferences and user groups and seen a lot of demos, but before that talk, I’d never seen a speaker eliminate the inevitable typos and otherwise speed up his presentation that way. When there was some code he wanted to show that exhibited an aspect of his Practical MVVM Manifesto, he simply grabbed a commit from his local Mercurial repository and updated the code in place. The next time I give a talk or do any demos, I hope I can make good use of that trick too.