I found a great little feature in the Prism4 framework. They overloaded the RaisePropertyChanged method of the ViewModelBase class to accept a lambda instead of a string and use a bit of reflection to extract the propertyname itself.
RaisePropertyChanged("Employees");
RaisePropertyChanged(()=>this.Employees);
This means intellisnse and no more runtime errors. Even if you don't use the Prism framework, you can easily extend your own ViewModel base with this functionality. Code snippet for the Base Class: RaisePropertyChanged.txt (1,82 kb) (There is a slight performance issue due to the Reflection.)
Changing existing code to use this notation is easy if you use the Regular Expression feature of Visual Studio Search/Replace.
..and thank's to RasmusKL for pointing me in the direction of standard Visual Studio search/replace instead of trying to use Recharpers pattern catalog.
Tags: mvvm, silverlight, wpf, regex