Binding works without INotifyPropertyChanged, why?

Question

This is how we do it normally:

public class ViewModel : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
    string _test;
    public string Test
    {
        get { return _test; }         


        

Answer 1

[...] you are encountering a another hidden aspect of WPF, that's it WPF's data binding engine will data bind to PropertyDescriptor instance which wraps the source property if the source object is a plain CLR object and doesn't implement INotifyPropertyChanged interface. And the data binding engine will try to subscribe to the property changed event through PropertyDescriptor.AddValueChanged() method. And when the target data bound element change the property values, data binding engine will call PropertyDescriptor.SetValue() method to transfer the changed value back to the source property, and it will simultaneously raise ValueChanged event to notify other subscribers (in this instance, the other subscribers will be the TextBlocks within the ListBox.

And if you are implementing INotifyPropertyChanged, you are fully responsible to implement the change notification in every setter of the properties which needs to be data bound to the UI. Otherwise, the change will be not synchronized as you'd expect.

See: Data binding without INotifyPropertyChanged