I am converting a chat parser for a game i play that i wrote in c# winforms over to wpf, mainly just to get a better handle on MVVM and wpf. Here is a run down of how i have my project set up
View: For now its just a simple ListBox with ItemSource bound to my viewmodels observable chat collection
Model: I have multiple characters that can be logged in at one time and each character has a chat class. The chat class starts a background worker that grabs and next line of chat from the game and fires off an event called IncomingChat with this line.
public event Action<Game.ChatLine> IncomingChat;
I'm using a background worker to fire an event in my backgroundworkers progresschaged event because when i was using a timer i kept getting a threading issue. At first i corrected this by changing my Timer to a DispatchTimer, but this didn't seem right to me to have a DispatchTimer in my model.
ViewModel: Since i have multiple characters i am creating multiple ChatViewModels. I pass a character into the ChatViewModels constructor and subscribe to the Chat event. I create a ObservableColleciton to hold my chat lines when this event is received. Now I'm receiving a threading issue on my viewModel when trying to add the line i receive from my chat event to my observablecollection.
I got around this by making my viewmodels incoming chat event handler look like so
public ObservableCollection<Game.ChatLine) Chat {get; private set;}
void Chat_Incoming(Game.ChatLine line)
{
App.Current.Dispatcher.Invoke(new Action(delegate
{
Chat.Add(line)
}), null);
}
This doesn't feel right to me though. Although it works, using Dispatcher in my viewmodel like this seems out of place to me.