This view model is obviously designed to manage a list of contacts. It also exposes a delete command and a flag to indicate whether delete is allowed (thus maintaining state for the view). Often the flag would be part of the command object, but the example is in Silverlight 3 which does not have native support for command binding, and I wanted to show a simple solution that didn’t require a fancy framework. The view model here makes a concrete reference to the service, you would most likely wire in that reference externally or use a dependency injection framework. What’s nice is we have the flexibility to build it like this initially and then refactor as needed. It fetches the list of “contacts” right away, which is a hard-coded list of me and someone a little more popular. The phone numbers, of course, are faked.