There is one major flaw you must have encountered whilst working with Silverlight for a while: its incompatibility with unit tests! Unless you’ve been using Silverlight solely for drawing circles and rectangles, surely you must have tried to use the Silverlight Toolkit unit test project template to try to put some TDD in your project ! …most probably you were disappointed by it because it’s fairly poor…

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MVVM is a quite mature design pattern one can use with the microsoft WPF framework, or with Silverlight. You’ll find a lot of literature and tools on the web to start a new development with this pattern.

In this article, we show how MVVM can be implemented for a quite large application, and the value it brings in a Behavior Driven Development approach.

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To unit test our iPhone developments we rely heavily on Google-Toolbox-for-Mac and OCMock.
After updating to the iphone SDK4 (IOS4) and Xcode 3.2.3 we had an unpleasant surprise : our testing frameworks refused to compile and as of today we have no information about how to solve this situation.
Nevetheless we managed to resolve this problem :
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With the Flex framework, we are able to quickly develop a GUI that works, especially through the MXML language. Indeed, this language is an effective way to describe the interface with a few lines of code.

The problem occurs after the POC step is done, MXML code complexity increases, ActionScript code which implements event handlers, services calls or business logic creeps slowly into the MXML code.
After some time, it becomes harder to figure out where data being displayed come from (ie. which code updated it ?), which code calls a service and from where the service arguments come from.

In this post, we will see some good practices which help in keeping a high level of maintainability for Flex applications.
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