design patterns - How to navigate through windows with MVVM Light for WPF?

Question

I've just started a new project in which the presentation layer will be done by WPF and MVVM Light by GalaSoft.

I need a lot of views and it's not clear to me how to manage navigation through windows.

First of all, the templates offered in MVVM Light for creating a new "WPF MVVM View" create a new Window that is not possible to use for navigation by frame (I mean, by putting a frame in mainView and changing the source path to navigate).

Do I simply have to change Window to Page for all the views I create using templates?

Or is there a different way to perform navigation in WPF with the MVVM Light toolkit?

Answer 1

I usually use a ContentControl to display dynamic content. It's Content property is usually bound to a CurrentViewModel property in the parent ViewModel, and DataTemplates are used to tell WPF how to draw the child ViewModels.

To change views, simply change the CurrentViewModel property in the parent ViewModel

You can find an example at this article of mine