Share datacontext for two views

Question

I am building a website from the standard Silverlight Navigation Application in VS2012. I would like to have the same datacontext for my Mainpage-view and my Home-view. I have created an Employee class with one property, Name, which i would like to show in a textblock on the navigation in the mainpage-view and in the content of the home-view. In the home-view i will also have a textblock, from where i can change the content of name.

No matter how i try to set the datacontext it always create an instance of employee for each of the two views. How do i make them use the same instance?

Employee.cs

public class Employee : INotifyPropertyChanged
{
    string _name = "Test";
    public string Name
    {
        get { return _name; }
        set
        {
            if (_name != value)
            {
                _name = value;
                OnPropertyChanged("Name");
            }
        }
    }      

    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;

    void OnPropertyChanged(string propertyName)
    {
        var handler = PropertyChanged;
        if (handler != null)
        {
            handler(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName));
        }
    }
} 

MainPage.xaml

<TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationNameTextBlock" Style="{StaticResource ApplicationNameStyle}" 
           Text="{Binding Name}"/>

Home.xaml

<TextBox Text="{Binding Name, Mode=TwoWay}"/>    
<TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}"/>  

Answer 1

This can be a achieved with a helper class that is often called a ViewModelLocator.

public static class ViewModelLocator
{
    private static Employee myEmployee = null;
    public static Employee GetEmployee()
    {
        if (myEmployee == null)
            myEmployee = new Employee();

        return myEmployee;
    }
}

In code behind of your pages:

DataContext = ViewModelLocator.GetEmployee();