The MVVM architectural design pattern

Here is a brief technical explanation of MVVM, which contains enough detail (borrowed from its WPF implementation) and examples to allow the reader to grasp how it actually works.

Object Lifetime Awareness

The Thinker (French: Le Penseur) by Auguste Rodin (From Wikipedia)

Abstract

Garbage collectors have given us a false sense of security with respect to what happens to an object once we stop thinking about it. The assumption is that it will be magically taken care of, but this does not always go as hoped, resulting in memory leaks and bugs due to failure to perform necessary cleanup. Tools for troubleshooting such problems are scarce, and not particularly helpful, so finding and fixing such problems is notoriously difficult. 

A methodology is presented, which differs from current widespread practices, for maintaining awareness of, and exercising full deterministic control over, the lifetime of certain objects in a garbage-collected environment. We issue hard errors in the event of misuse, and accurate diagnostic messages in the event of omissions, thus improving the robustness of software and lessening the troubleshooting burden.