Caliburn Micro Part 1: Getting Started

A few days ago I blogged about our new Dashboard sample included in WPF Elements. The sample demonstrates how to create a sales dashboard using a few of our WPF controls like the Data Grid, Time Explorer and Charts. It was built with the help of the Caliburn Micro framework to give it a robust MVVM architecture. In this blog post I’ll walk you through a simple tutorial for getting started with using Caliburn Micro in a WPF application. This is just part 1 in a series I will be writing so I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along with me as we build up to a useful application.

Step 1: Getting Started

Caliburn Micro targets .NET framework 4.0, so you’ll need Visual Studio 2010 to create the application. Start by creating a new WPF Application and add a reference to Caliburn.Micro.dll and System.Windows.Interactivity.dll which come with the Caliburn Micro download. Since Caliburn Micro is going to take care of creating the window for you, delete MainWindow.xaml and remove the StartupUri attribute from App.xaml. App.xaml will now look like this:

<Application x:Class="CaliburnMicroApp.App"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml">
  <Application.Resources>
 
  </Application.Resources>
</Application>

Step 2: The View Model

Caliburn Micro promotes a View-Model-First approach, so the next step is to add a class to represent the view model. Large applications can have many view models, each of which provides the logic for a different view. Below is a code example of an empty view model. Since this tutorial is focused on simply getting started with incorporating Caliburn Micro into a WPF application, we are not going to make the view model do anything for now.

using Caliburn.Micro;
 
namespace CaliburnMicroApp
{
  public class AppViewModel : PropertyChangedBase
  {
 
  }
}

The first thing to notice here is the name of the class. Caliburn Micro expects a particular naming convention so it can hook up the view model to the appropriate view. The class name of a view model should end with “ViewModel”. What you put in front of “ViewModel” is up to you. The other thing to notice here is that this class extends the PropertyChangedBase. This is provided by Caliburn Micro and makes it easy to raise property change notifications without needing to implement INotifyPropertyChanged in all your view models. Although this example view model doesn’t do anything, I’ve included the PropertyChangedBase as good practice. When adding properties to the view model, it will come in handy.

Read more: Mindscape
QR:

Posted via email from Jasper-net