- Fitting It In
- Task List
- The Development Process in a Nutshell
- Say Hello
- Create a New Project
- Run in the Simulator
- Set Some XAML Properties
- Change the XAML
- Use the Property Window
- Add a Contract
- Wire up the Flyout
- Add a Live Tile
- Certify your App
- Say What?
- Visual Studio Templates
- Common Files
- Visual Studio 2013 Express
- Using the Simulator
- The XAML Designer
- Blend integration
- Review
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Common Files
The files in the Common folder aren’t included in a project created from the Blank App template, but there’s some useful stuff here. We’ll be discussing all of these and the issues they address in later chapters, but here’s a preview of coming attractions:
Navigation Helper- Most of the Visual Studio templates, including the Hub app we just created, include the ability to navigate forward and backward through you app’s pages. The NavigationHelper provides support for this functionality, which we’ll explore in detail in Chapter 13.
- ObservableDictionary
- The ObservableDictionary is a standard dictionary object (that is, it has keys defined as Strings and entries defined as Objects) that supports data binding. ObservableDictionary is the default type of the ViewModel implemented by the Visual Studio templates. We’ll discuss MVVM and ViewModels (briefly) on the next page, and data binding in Chapter 12.
- RelayCommand
- Relay commands are a common method of implementing commanding across app levels when using the MVVM design pattern. You can use the RelayCommand class implemented by the templates in your own code, and it’s also used by the NavigationHelper class.
- SuspensionManager
- The SuspensionManager class handles saving and restoring state information when a user switches to another app. We’ll discuss suspension in Chapter 14.
UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: MODEL-VIEW-VIEWMODEL
The Visual Studio templates implement the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern (among others).
If you’ve worked with WPF, you’ve almost certainly heard of the MVVM design patern. (You’ve probably used it.) But if you’re new to this environment, terms like VIEWMODEL might need a bit of explanation. At it’s most basic, the MVVM design pattern divides an application into three layers:
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The XAML binding infrastructure that we’ll examine in Chapter 12 makes MVVM very clean and relatively simple to implement. The pattern has been widely adopted by the development community, and it is implicit in the structure of the Visual Studio project templates.
If you’re interested in learning more about the MVVM pattern, Josh Smith’s article “WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern”, available on MSDN, is a good place to start. You might also want to look at the MVVM Light toolkit, available on CodePlex.