Reusing a menu with mvvm and wpf

I was wondering what the best approach is for sharing a menu across all wpf windows/views.

My Application doesnt really fit the navigation model, so will probably use a Ribbon control.

I am leaning towards creating a user control for the menu and dropping开发者_Go百科 it on each view, but have also seen Josh Smith's msdn article, where he loads user controls.

Are there any other options or established best practices?

Thanks in Advance.

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I ended up implementing in a way similar to Josh Smiths; I have however simplified things a bit.

All views are usercontrols, except the MainWindow. The MainWindow contains a ContentTemplate which is bound to a property holding reference to a single UserControl in the view model. I then have an ApplicationController responsible for controlling the view and view model lifecycle. The ViewModel base class used by each view contains a reference to the IApplicationController. The MainWindowViewModel then makes calls to the ApplicationController to load a new view etc.

Still not 100% on this approach so would welcome any further suggestions.

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Here's what I would probably try:

• Define an ISharedMenu interface
• Create a UserControl which uses the ISharedMenu as its DataContext.
• For each ViewModel that you want to use the shared menu, implement the ISharedMenu interface.