About Notify

When building WPF and WinForms applications, I often run into the need to know when there is a change in a data-binding data source (which implements INotifyCollectionChanged and/or INotifyPropertyChanged).

For example, imagine an application with a screen for users to edit some settings. By default, the Save button is disabled because no change was made yet. Whenever a user makes a change to the screen, data binding triggers a change to the underlying data source and the Save button should be enabled.

For a simple screen bound to a simple underlying data source, it is easy to just listen to the PropertyChanged or CollectionChanged events and enable the Save button accordingly. For more complicated screens with multiple tabs and nested subviews bound to multiple data sources, this task becomes tedious and error-prone. (Try writing code to track changes to a grand grand grand child of an element which is just added to a collection reachable via a property of a root object! There you go.)

This library is built to simplify change tracking for INotifyCollectionChanged and INotifyPropertyChanged data sources.

Using Notify

Add reference to Notify.dll, e.g. via NuGet

Install-Package Notify 

Next, create a Tracker instance to track your objects and handle its Changed event

var tracker = new Tracker().Track(root1, root2);
tracker.Changed += _ => EnableSave();

// ...sometimes later
tracker.Dispose(); // stop bothering me

That's it! The unit test includes detailed usage of the library. Go take a look and have fun being notified of changes.

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