Sometimes design time data just won’t show, even though everything works at runtime. This is quite normal since Expression Blend, and the Visual Studio designer for that matter don’t instantiate our views and ViewModels in the context of an application.

MefedMVVM has a concept of design time data using the IDesignTimeAware interface, so we can provide an implementation of our ViewModel purely for use by the designers.

In my current case, despite having all my bindings correct, and things working at runtime, Blend refuses to show me the design time ListBoxItems…

So like all things code-FAIL related, we debug, simply set a break point on the DesignTimeInitialization method and attach to Expression Blend.

You will need to close and re-open the Xaml View (or do a build) so Blend re-initialises our ViewModel… and viola! We now know what the problem is.

In my case it was simply a service which was missing at design time. Allowing defaults allows the design time composition to succeed since we don’t actually need it until runtime.

Much better!