Build MVVM Applications in F#… or C#

Last month Chris Marinos had an article in MSDN Magazine titled “Build MVVM Applications in F#”

I liked it a lot. I jotted down some notes as I read it. My learning processed amused me as I went from WTF… to Hrm… to Oh I see… in a period of about 15 minutes or so.

It went something like this:

> My first thought on skimming the first 3 pages…
>
> Ok, no offense… but… Dude! Really?!?
>
> PM> Install-Package NotifyPropertyWeaver
>
> and my "viewmodel" can be class MovieVieModelCSharp { public string Name
> {get;set;} public string Genre { get;set;} public int Rating {get;set;}
> public MovieVieModelCSharp(Movie movie) { Name=movie.Name;
> Genre=movie.Genre; if(OptionModule.IsSome(movie.Rating)
> Rating=movie.Rating.Value; else Rating=0;} }
>
> But then I realize that isn’t the point of that part of the article.
>
> Everything looks cool. I’m wondering if NotifyPropertyWeaver would work
> with the Dummy F# view model in Figure 7.
>
> Then I see in Figure 9 you use the ViewModelBase. That is cool I guess,
> but I think NPW might allow for writing WAY less code.
>
> …
> OK… i spent some time exploring these idea and realized I’m clueless.
> F# has no concept of autoproperites (WART!) and its A LOT of code to
> write a mutable property (warts!). NPW sure isn’t going to work with
> non-autoproperties (it picks up on C#/VB autoproperty naming convention
> of the compiler IIRC).
>
> So all that said… I think your article is great.
>
> It challenged me to investigate some things. It shows me that F# really
> sucks for WPF. It makes me really appreciate C# autoproperties and NPW.
> Damn that is some ugly ass code in that last "all F#" section.

Now some interesting parts to this is that NotifyPropertyWeaver apparently DOES support weaving PropertyChanged into non-autoproperties. That is pretty cool, but even with that, I think that this is a case where C# is actually more appropriate than F#.