I recently had a query from a customer that was one of those ones that you think “Aha! That’s easy, you just do this”. Then you think a bit more about it and realise that if you want to do it properly it’s not quite as simple as you first thought.

This particular query related to how to use the navigation framework introduced in Silverlight 3 with the MVVM pattern. For those that don’t know the Model-View-ViewModel pattern is a common pattern often used to build Silverlight and WPF applications since it has strong support for databound UIs and provides good abstraction for unit testing and keeping your view logic separate from the view and the model.