Download the sample project seen in this video. Data binding is one of the fundamental concepts for good Windows Phone application design but can be difficult to grasp for newcomers. The core concept is this: No one wants to manually update the user interface elements. I want my UI to automatically reflect the state of my application and data binding helps us do this. We can work exclusively on our Windows Phone UI, bind the values in the UI and then work on the inner logic of the application knowing that all the updates are being reflected to the user. Because of the power in the model you see in this video and post, there are some really great "fringe" benefits in terms of interaction and design that we get along with the core benefits. So let's build our first data binding. By a happy coincidence, this can also be our first ViewModel from scratch. I use Visual Studio snippets in the video and in "real life" because it's substantially faster and I have a very poor memory. You can download the notify property snippets I used here. Just extract them into your "Documents\Visual Studio 2012\Code Snippets\Visual C#\My Code Snippets" folder and you should be ready to go. As a "first steps" post, we're going to go through how to build a data binding step by step. To see this model in action, just open up a new My First Data Binding In our app, lets create a new ViewModel. I right-clicked in the ViewModel folder and went to "App -> Class..." and created just an empty Class file named "SampleViewModel.cs". This class now looks like this: class SampleViewModel

{

} We update it to implement the INotifyPropertyChanged event by declaring that interface and using the "notifyInterface" snippet. Hit Alt-Shift-F10 to resolve any refrerences (specifically the System.ComponentModel) and our code should now look like this: public class SampleViewModel : INotifyPropertyChanged

{

public event PropertyChang