WPF Binding to parent DataContext

Question

We have a WPF application with a standard MVVM pattern, leveraging Cinch (and therefore MefedMVVM) for View -> ViewModel resolution. This works well, and I can bind the relevant

Answer 1

Because of things like this, as a general rule of thumb, I try to avoid as much XAML "trickery" as possible and keep the XAML as dumb and simple as possible and do the rest in the ViewModel (or attached properties or IValueConverters etc. if really necessary).

If possible I would give the ViewModel of the current DataContext a reference (i.e. property) to the relevant parent ViewModel

public class ThisViewModel : ViewModelBase
{
    TypeOfAncestorViewModel Parent { get; set; }
}

and bind against that directly instead.