.NET & Funky Fresh

Durandal 1.2.0 and Caliburn.Micro 1.5.0 Released!

Rob Eisenberg — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:10:59 GMT

Two awesome releases in the last week! Much thanks to the great community surrounding both projects! Here’s what’s new:

Durandal 1.2.0

Tons of bug fixes.
Lots of improvements to the router.
Better support for integrating with Q, KendoUI and Dojo.
More docs.

Caliburn.Micro. 1.5.0

Nigel Sampson and Thomas Ibel are going to town these days! Some really cool stuff happening in this release. Here’s a few things:

Task and Async support (on all platforms except SL4 and WP71)
Task/Coroutine integration.
Actions can return tasks.
More async stuff in general.
Support for the WinRT Share Charm
Support for the WinRT Settings Charm
Various bug fixes and minor improvements throughout.

You can get the latest versions of both of these frameworks on Nuget.

Introducing Durandal

Rob Eisenberg — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:32:00 GMT

Today I'm very excited to officially bring to you Durandal!

Durandal is a new open source JavaScript library for rich client application development. It focuses on providing an enjoyable and productive developer experience centered around simple conventions and standard patterns like MVC, MVP and MVVM. Durandal is built on libs you know and love like jQuery, Knockout and RequireJS, so there's little to learn and building apps feels comfortable and familiar.

Here's a short list of it's features:

Clean MV* Architecture
JS & HTML Modularity
Simple App Lifecycle
Eventing, Modals, Message Boxes, etc.
Navigation & Screen State Management
Consistent Async Programming w/ Promises
App Bundling and Optimization
Use any Backend Technology
Built on top of jQuery, Knockout & RequireJS
Integrates with other libraries such as SammyJS & Bootstrap
Make jQuery & Bootstrap widgets templatable and bindable (or build your own widgets).

I'm also pleased to announce that I've been working with the ASP.NET team to bring Durandal to you as an ASP.NET MVC Template, released today and compatible with the new Web Tools 2012.2 release. You can grab the VSIX, install it and get started very quickly building rich web apps now. If using the VSIX isn’t your style, we’ve got several nuget packages available too. Finally, if you just love NodeJS, you might be interested in using our Mimosa skeleton.

To learn more, please visit the official site, where you will find the getting started guide, documentation, videos, training and commercial support options.

Stay tuned. There's lots to say about Durandal and I look forward to sharing it with you in the coming weeks and months.

Caliburn.Micro v1.4.1 Released

Rob Eisenberg — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 19:43:06 GMT

I’m labeling this the Thomas Ibel/Nigel Sampson release. Why? Because these two hardworking gentlemen have put great effort into bringing you the most mature version of Caliburn.Micro yet. In the two months since our 1.4 release they’ve dealt with almost every outstanding issue on our list. Great work guys! In addition to bug fixes, there’s been some minor enhancements, we’ve synced up the latest WUI library and added official support for WPF 4.5. You can get it on Nuget now. Enjoy!

Bring on the AWESOME!!! Caliburn.Micro v1.4 Released

Rob Eisenberg — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 03:28:00 GMT

Today I’m happy to announce the official release of Caliburn.Micro v1.4. This release brings a ton of bug fixes across all platforms, nuget fixes…and best of all…full support for WinRT and WP8. That means that Caliburn.Micro now supports WPF, SL4, SL5, WP7, WP8 and WinRT. AWESOME!!! You can get it on nuget.org or download the binaries directly from codeplex.

How did this happen you say? Well, not without generous help from the community who believed in this project and put in the hours to make it happen. Here’s a few people I’d like to mention:

Marco Amendola – A Caliburn veteran. Always working hard on bugs, features and community support.
Chin Bae – Master of our view location strategy.
Nigel Sampson – Monster WinRT port guru. He practically ported the entire thing himself. REALLY.
Thomas Ibel – Tons and tons of bug fixes and stability improvements.
Matt Hidinger – Did all the grunt work to get official WP8 support into this release.

I’d also like to thank all the community members who tested out this version, submitted feedback..and of course…thanks to everyone who submitted pull requests. It was a tremendous help!

Finally, I’d like to extend a special thank you to Scott Hanselman, Scott Hunter and the whole .NET team for supporting open source software and providing the necessary licenses I needed to actually build and release this version. It would not have been possible without their kindness and generosity.

For reference, here’s the full list of nuget packages and their descriptions:

Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly.
Caliburn.Micro.Start - Includes Caliburn.Micro plus a starting bootstrapper, view model and view.
Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro inversion of control container (IoC); source code drop-in.
Caliburn.Micro.EventAggregator – The Caliburn.Micro event aggregator; source code drop-in.
Caliburn.Micro.INPC – The Caliburn.Micro INPC infrastructure: PropertyChangedBase, BindableCollection, Execute.OnUIThread and InDesignMode checking; source code drop-in.

Note: We have removed the starting bootstrapper, view and view model template code from the core package and added a new package, Caliburn.Micro.Start, which now has the core plus the startup files.

Go forth and build Xaml awesomeness! And stay tuned for an update on Durandal in the next few weeks too ;)

This community project is sponsored by Xceed, makers of Xceed DataGrid for WPF, the enterprise datagrid that provides a rich, fluid, and high performance user experience. 50% off any Xceed product with coupon code G00B8T. Xceed also offers Extended Silverlight Toolkit and Extended WPF Toolkit here on Codeplex.

Introducing TypeScript

Rob Eisenberg — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 15:46:00 GMT

This is the first tech coming out of Microsoft in several years that I’m excited about….really excited about. So, I thought I would take you, dear reader, on a learning adventure with me. Let’s dive in…

What is TypeScript?

TypeScript is a new programming language that Microsoft has been working on, apparently, for several years now. Anders Hejlsberg, creator of C#, has recently been involved with a small team of talented language gurus to bring it to us in the initial pre-release form.

Simply stated: TypeScript is a superset of the JavaScript programming language which can be compiled to plain Javascript. The superset distinction is important here. Every Javascript program is a TypeScript program and will compile with the TypeScript compiler without any alterations necessary. TypeScript works with any existing JavaScript libraries without the need for any sort of interoperability dance.

Why Use TypeScript?

TypeScript brings several of the features of ECMAScript 6th Edition to ECMAScript 3rd Edition compatible browsers and runtimes. This means you can have several of the cool features of tomorrow’s Javascript…today. Some of the most notable features are classes, modules and lexically scoped this (via arrow functions). So, by learning TypeScript today, you are also going to be learning some ECMAScript 6th Edition…that’s a pretty good return on your investment even if TypeScript is a complete flop….which I doubt it will be.

In addition to getting vNext JS features available in present and older browsers, TypeScript adds a structural type system and strong type inference to JavaScript. This opens the door to declared API contracts, better intellisense, refactoring and it naturally transforms many runtime errors into code squiggles or compile errors. As someone who spends 60+ hours a week now writing JS code…much of which is on a very large-scale SPA…I can tell you this is a big deal in terms of maintainability.

How Do I Get It?

Microsoft has two key locations on the web you need to know. The first is http://www.typescriptlang.org/ From there you can download the language specification, watch a Channel 9 Video with Anders introducing the language, play with the language directly from your browser and run some samples. You’ll also find download links for the VS2012 plugin and compiler tools as well as the source. WAIT. Did I just say source? YES. TypeScript is completely open source on CodePlex under the Apache License 2.0. You can git clone that sucka to your heart’s content…which brings me to the second web location you need to know: http://typescript.codeplex.com/

How Do I Get Involved?

As I mentioned, TypeScript is on CodePlex. There’s a community building up there already. So you can jump into the discussion forums to ask questions…or answer them with your new found knowledge :) Naturally, you can submit bugs and feature requests too. There’s also a fair amount of info accumulating on stack overflow now.

Show Me How to Write a Program!!!

Download the tooling and run the msi or install it as a node package with: npm install –g typescript
Once this is done, you’ve got a new exe added to your command path called “tsc” You guessed it. That stands for “TypeScript Compiler.”
To compile a program it’s as simple as typing this on the command prompt: tsc myCode.ts
.ts is the extension for TypeScript source files.
.d.ts is the extension for TypeScript declaration source files (more on that in a future post)

Let’s do it! Create a new file and call it…dum dum dum….helloworld.ts. You can open it in any text editor, but if you’ve installed the VS tools above, you should open it in VS…it’s got bling.

Now, let’s write some code. This will be a pretty bloated hello world example, but it will show you some fun language stuff in the process. Here’s the code to put in the helloworld.ts file:

module HelloWorld {
    class Messenger {
        repeat: number;

        constructor (public message = "Hello World") {
            this.repeat = 1;
        }

        speak() {
            for (var i = 0; i < this.repeat; i++) {
                console.log(this.message);
            }
        }

        static SayHelloInSlang() { 
            new Messenger("'Sup World?").speak();
        }
    }

    var m = new Messenger();
    m.speak();

    Messenger.SayHelloInSlang();
}

To get the full VS experience, you should type this in manually, rather than copy/paste. The reason for that is that VS will show you errors, types, etc. as you type the code. You’ll also get intellisense. Here’s a few things to notice about this code:

It’s modularized! This is called an internal module. You can also create external modules which the compiler can transform into CommonJS modules or AMD modules (yes you can use it with require.js :) whoohoo). You can tell the compiler how to transform your external modules via the –module switch. This enables you to have a single source set of modules that could run on the server in Node with CommonJS and in the browser with AMD using require.js. Nice. The –module switch defaults to CommonJS, but you can provide the value of amd to build for require.js or a similar amd module loader. But, that’s not related to this code…just a bonus tidbit. This is an internal module which means it will compile to a standard immediately executed function closure-based module.
There is a class!!! The compiler will help you call that ctor with new…no more forgotten new keywords on ctor functions. But you can also more succinctly create classes than with the standard prototype-based syntax you normally need.
The ctor has a default parameter value. Also, the public modifier instructs the compiler that the parameter’s value should automatically be stored into a public property of the object. Nice and succinct.
There’s a static function on the class.
Mouse over things and you will see that there’s some nice type inference happening on variables and function signatures…even though only one type is declared anywhere.
Intellisense is beautiful.
Try refactoring something. It works :)

Now, let’s compile the code. Open your command prompt and navigate to the folder you placed helloworld.ts in. Type the following:

tsc helloworld.ts

The compiler outputs a .js file with the following JavaScript code:

var HelloWorld;
(function (HelloWorld) {
    var Messenger = (function () {
        function Messenger(message) {
            if (typeof message === "undefined") { message = "Hello World"; }
            this.message = message;
            this.repeat = 1;
        }
        Messenger.prototype.speak = function () {
            for(var i = 0; i < this.repeat; i++) {
                console.log(this.message);
            }
        };
        Messenger.SayHelloInSlang = function SayHelloInSlang() {
            new Messenger("'Sup World?").speak();
        }
        return Messenger;
    })();    
    var m = new Messenger();
    m.speak();
    Messenger.SayHelloInSlang();
})(HelloWorld || (HelloWorld = {}));

As you can see, it’s just standard JavaScript code. There is no runtime component to TypeScript. Everything boils down to plain JavaScript.

Of course there’s lots more to TypeScript. We’ve barely scratched the surface. I’m planning to write some more blog posts covering my escapades. Hopefully we can talk more about external modules, structural types, interfaces, lambdas, etc. See ya next time!

Gen Con and Kickstarter!

Rob Eisenberg — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:47:00 GMT

Today I ship off to Gen Con to exhibit my new web-based RPG product RPGWithMe! If you are attending, I hope you will visit me in booth 1850.

I’ve also got a big announcement for today! I’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to help me build out a system-agnostic character creation tool for the site. Please check out our Kickstarter page for opportunities to back and receive some cool RPGWithMe swag, such as fantasy themed t-shirts and posters. If you like fantasy art, you’ll want to check out what former Weta artist Ben Wootten has created for us.

Even if you can’t back the project financially, we hope you’ll help us get the word out by sharing it with your friends and via social media networks such as facebook and twitter.

Thanks everyone!

PS- Yes I’m going to go there….if you are a Caliburn.Micro user…and want to show your appreciation….maybe you could back my kickstarter? (It has nothing to do with CM…except that it’s partially built with Durandal….but it would make me happy ).

Today….All Your Wildest Dreams Come True

Rob Eisenberg — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 20:07:00 GMT

If you fit into any one (or more) of these three categories…

You like tabletop RPGs
You build Xaml applications
You build Html/JS applications

1. RPGWithMe

For some time I’ve been cranking away building my company’s first real product. I’m very excited to officially announce to you today that RPGWithMe is live! RPGWithMe is a web-based platform centered around tabletop RPGs. If you play these games…you are going to like this a lot. RPGWithMe provides four main feature areas in its initial launch:

Character Sheets

The industry’s most beautiful character sheets, fully interactive and free: Use them at the gametable on your tablet or laptop. They’re also fully integrated into our play-by-post and virtual tabletop experience. It's as simple as uploading DDI or Hero Lab ^® files. Custom character creation is coming soon…

Campaign Management

We provide gorgeous home pages for your campaigns. Use our live-previewing editor to write wiki articles and pin them to your home page. Chronicle your adventure and automatically have your content indexed for later. Plus, access our enormous, high quality art library for use in your wiki or upload your own art.

Play-by-Post

We’ve built our system from the ground up to support PbP. It fully integrates your player’s character sheets and your campaign wiki. It snapshots roll, magic, power and feat data and provides multiple views over your campaign’s activity feed with the ability to bookmark and integrate your character’s journals too.

Virtual Tabletop

Build maps, play out combat and track NPC stats. Our virtual table can be used to enhance PbP beyond anything you’ve seen. Of course, you can always use it as a realtime virtual table on it's own and feel the power of integrated character sheets, rich activity feeds and campaign management.

RPGWithMe Teaser

2. Caliburn.Micro WinRT

Thanks to the fantastic work of Nigel Sampson and Keith Patton we now have support for the full Caliburn.Micro feature set on WinRT. This is he initial port…and its not an official release yet, so there’s bound to be bugs. But if you want to use CM to build your WinRT app, please start using this code and help us iron out the kinks….and naturally start enjoying the CM way of building apps on WinRT.

3. Durandal

Durandal is the essence of Caliburn.Micro re-imagined for HTML and Javascript. A very early version of the code is now available on github. It is a very small amount of code built on top of three existing and established Javascript libraries: jQuery, Knockout and Require. Features include:

Fully modularize your html and js the same way you would when building Caliburn.Micro applications. ie. Shell.js automatically locates Shell.html, binds and gets composed into the dom. Naturally you can change the conventions…
Leverage promises everywhere as the API uses no callbacks, but has CommonJS promises plumbed throughout
Experience the first html/js framework where Composition is embraced at the very core. The view/view-model composition features of Durandal are even more powerful than Caliburn.Micro.
A simple app model provides you with an app start lifecycle, modal dialogs, message boxes and an event aggregator.

This is a pre-pre-pre-alpha version. There are no docs and just one sample at the moment. But, I wanted to get it out there so you could dig into the code, start playing with it and give me feedback. Of course I’ll add docs, more samples, tests, etc. Just in case you are wondering though, Durandal is already being used in production as the framework for RPGWithMe’s virtual tabletop. Various versions/pieces of it are being used by some of my clients…details not available right now, but I hope to share more later.

Things I would like to do with Durandal in the future:

Remove the Knockout dependency. I don’t like how knockout bindings work in html and I don’t like how observables invade your model code. Both are ugly, tedious and obscure the readability of the code. I have a plan to fix both of these, but it’s non-trivial. I chose to put together this initial version based on knockout since it was already in heavy use and it was quick and easy. In the future I hope we can improve on that.
Remove the jQuery dependency. Durandal only uses a few features of jQuery. So, eventually, I’d like to have an alternate solution without an external dependency. You can always use jQuery if you want to, but in the long term, I don’t want to force it on developers.
Create a component model for building reusable controls. This should work similar to Xaml in that controls should have a distinct view written in html which can be replaced globally or on a per use basis. Controls should also support templated parts with the same characteristics.

Ok. That’s enough news for today. Enjoy. Now…I’m going to rest for a bit.

Caliburn.Micro and MVVM on InfoQ

Rob Eisenberg — Mon, 07 May 2012 17:06:00 GMT

If you are interested to hear some of the back story behind Caliburn.Micro…or just curious about my own conception of MVVM and how it fits in with other popular UI design patterns, I hope you will check out this interview on InfoQ. As always, feedback is much appreciated. Happy Monday and have a blessed week

The Manifold Blunders of Xaml–Part 1: Version and Platform Hell

Rob Eisenberg — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 15:43:00 GMT

I started work with “Xaml-based” platforms in the pre-Beta days of WPF, so I’ve been working with this technology longer than most. Back then I was utterly awed and inspired by it’s capabilities. Today I’m frustrated and sometimes outraged. As I’ve traveled to various conferences, worked with various companies and interacted with the many Caliburn.Micro users, I’ve discovered that I’m not the only one who feels this way. This blog series attempts to catalog a number of the issues, some of which have been there from the very beginning; others creeping in over time. This is an aggregate of my own observations and those of the community.

Versions

Let’s take a brief stroll through the platform timeline:

2006 – WPF 3.0
2007 – Silverlight 1
2007– WPF 3.5
2008 – Silverlight 2
2008 – WPF3.5 sp1
2009 – Silverlight 3
2010 - Silverlight 4
2010 – WP7
2010 – WPF4.0
2011 – Silverlight 5
2011 – WP7 Mango
2011 – Lakeshore¹
2012 – WinRT/Metro²

If we focus on the platforms and ignore their various versions, we have something like this:

2006 – WPF
2007 Silverlight 1.0 (no CLR)
2008 – Silverlight 2.0 (CLR)
2010 – WP7
2011 – Lakeshore
2012 – WinRT/Metro

So, it appears that Microsoft has released a new UI platform at least every two years! Let’s contrast that to the timeline for pre-Xaml UI technologies:

1985?– Win16
1995 – Win32
2001 – WinForms
2006 – WPF

Interesting. We have at least 5 – 6 years between platforms prior to Xaml, but it’s actually about 10yrs due to the fact that WinForms is just making Win32 available to managed languages. It’s just a wrapper around existing APIs. Each of the Xaml platforms is actually a different runtime altogether. So as far as platforms go, we’ve gone from one every 10yrs to one every 2 years. But that’s not all, let’s look at Xaml itself:

2006 – Xaml 2006 Spec
2008 – Silverlight 1 Xaml
2009 – Xaml 2009 Spec
2011 – Silverlight 5 Xaml
2012 – WinRT/Metro Xaml

Aside from the actual platforms released, we have a parallel divergence in Xaml markup capabilities. In 2006 the first version of Xaml was released. It was formally defined and released as a spec shortly after. When Silverlight came along, Microsoft failed to create a Xaml language compatible with their own specification. In fact, even Silverlight 5 doesn’t comply with the Xaml 2006 spec. In 2009 Microsoft released a new version of Xaml that fixed several important shortcomings with the 2006 spec….but not a single platform implemented it. WP7 is still playing catch-up with Silverlight and WPF. WinRT/Metro Xaml has less Xaml features than any platform. Furthermore, it significantly changes some aspects of Xaml altogether, making it compatible with almost nothing. Furthermore, some of the changes they are making will prevent it from ever becoming compatible in the future.

When I step back and try to look at this information objectively, the most natural conclusion I can come to is that Microsoft UI technologies are, and have been for the last five years, in a state of complete instability…and it doesn’t show any signs of change (esp. with the rumors that WP8 will not use Silverlight, but some variant of WinRT). You can’t count on anything. If we forget about app developers for a moment, and think about the ecosystem, imagine the effect this has on third party products, control vendors, open source frameworks and tooling. Every time MS spits out a new platform or Xaml flavor, the entire ecosystem has to start over.

My own Experience

I first wrote Caliburn for WPF when there was no word on anything like Silverlight existing. When Silverlight was first announced, it was branded WPF/e so I thought my framework would port. Unfortunately, when SL2 was made available, there were so many differences that I had no choice but to completely re-write Caliburn. Then, when WP7 was announced, I started porting Caliburn to that, only to discover that it was not possible. So, I did another complete re-write resulting in Caliburn.Micro. Now we have WinRT/Metro. I think I can port it, albeit, with a ton of conditional code. But, I’m not 100% sure yet. If it looks like another re-write…I’m done with this game.

Maintenance and Innovation

There are lots of negative side-effects to this sort of instability. The one that hits me most is that it creates a battle between maintenance and innovation. Again, speaking of my own project, I have plenty of ideas about how to improve Caliburn.Micro. I think some of them are minor niceties, but others are more along the innovative lines. But, you will never see any of them come to fruition. Why? Because the instability of the underlying platform, the constant release of new platforms…has put my project into a state of perpetual maintenance. I can’t innovate because I’m still trying to deal with the differences in WP7.5 and I’ve got developers (who can blame them?) banging down my door wanting to know when WinRT/Metro version will be available. It’s been discussed much in recent years as to why innovation seams to happen in non-Microsoft open source and on other platforms like Mac…while very little happens in Windows software. Could it be because we are spending our time re-writing everything every two years? and don’t have time to develop anything forward thinking?

Careless and Arbitrary

Sadly, many of the API and Xaml differences were completely avoidable. I remember one particular bug I had in Caliburn. It resulted from the fact that List<T>.Remove was implemented differently between WPF and Silverlight. In a particular scenario it would work fine on one platform and crash your app on another. There are hundreds, probably thousands of such issues, from the BCL all the way up through the UI stack. We aren’t talking about missing features here. We are talking about the same features which exhibit different behavior or have altered APIs. Sure, Microsoft worked hard to improve this with successive releases of Silverlight. But then came WP7, which stepped us back in time. Now look at WinRT. There are a number of changes that are completely arbitrary. They serve no technical purpose and don’t improve the API. They just make more work for developers who want to port code. If you want another fine example, just try to write a cross-framework design mode check.

A Lack of Understanding

Sigh. This one perfectly ironic issue really troubles me sometimes. Through all of this, I’ve realized that Microsoft doesn’t understand their own platform. I’ve got more to say on this later, but let’s look at this from an API perspective here. Consider this: every control specific to WP7 development could have been built on top of Silverlight without a need for a modified runtime. Most controls could have been implemented simply by styling an existing control or applying a template. For example, the Pivot control can be implemented using a tab control with a custom template and some attached behaviors. In fact, wouldn’t it have been cool if you could just use a Tab control in WP7 and it just changed it’s appearance to work on the phone?! Wait, wasn’t that the idea behind templating and adaptive layout to begin with? Here’s another example: Behaviors. Perhaps you didn’t know that Microsoft built this twice? In WPF there were Triggers. In fact, in both WPF and the Blend behavior system, there is a class called TriggerBase. They have the same name! They do the same thing! But, you can’t create custom triggers or actions in WPF because the ctor is marked internal. Did it not occur to anyone that they should just remove that instead of re-inventing the wheel? As a result, we now have two methods of doing triggers, and you have to know which to use for what. It’s even true in Silverlight, which has limited support for “traditional” triggers, but does have some. Ridiculous. I could go on and on about the types of internal and cross-platform inconsistencies MS has created by not simply understanding the core capabilities of their own framework.

All of this get’s really interesting if you consider that Mac is the platform that is considered most cutting edge and innovative in terms of UX…and they’ve scarcely had any major breaking changes since 2002. Considering that their phone apps run on their tablet and they are porting a number iOS features back to OSX…it must be nice only having to worry about two platforms and knowing that the OS vendor is making a visible, tangible effort to unify those two platforms…..but I’m getting off topic now.

End of Part One

There are lots of problems with Xaml, but I chose to start this series with one of my particular pain points. Some developers neither care nor are affected (yet) by these sorts of version issues, but they have a big effect on the surrounding ecosystem and are going to be with us for the next decade. Over the next several blog posts, we’ll discuss many other problems, some technical, some not so much, but all have been singled out by multiple members of the community (read: not just me) as problems. It is my hope that Microsoft employees working on these technologies will read this and seriously consider what they can do to improve things going forward or at least not perpetuate the same mistakes again. I also hope that .NET developers will take a long, hard look at this part of the platform and make an honest valuation of its strengths and weaknesses.

Footnotes

1. Lakeshore is the name I’ve been hearing thrown around for the Xaml-runtime for XBox, which sources say is Silverlight-based, but drastically altered. I have no official word from Microsoft on this. It’s just what I heard through the grapevine, though I’m fairly confident in the accuracy of the information. Supposedly this is what is powering the “apps” in the new XBox dashboard which was released around last Thanksgiving. EDIT: Apparently the XBox version is called Lakeview not Lakeshore.

2. I don’t actually know when WinRT/Metro will be released. I imagine that 2012 is a reasonable guess.

Alt.Tekpub REST

Rob Eisenberg — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 06:43:00 GMT

Mr. Conery has been working through building a RESTful API over on his blog. He’s tired of theory and has called on the community to submit some concrete examples in order to shed some light on the situation. I’m no expert in this area (I usually stick to UI stuff), but I have some experience, so I thought I’d make a contribution. Here’s some thoughts.

Issuing a GET to http://api.alttekpub.com returns:

<alttekpub>
  <links>
    <link rel="self" href="..." />
    <link rel="rels/productions" href="..." />
    <link rel="rels/new-episodes" href="..." />
    <link rel="rels/productions-by-category" href="...?category={category_name}" />
  </links>
  <categories>
    <category name="Microsoft" />
    <category name="Ruby" />
    <category name="JavaScript" />
    <category name="Mobile" />
  </categories>
</alttekpub>

One of my goals here is that clients only need to know a single uri: http://api.alttekpub.com After that, they should be able to follow links inside the document in order to navigate all the data and exercise all the features of the API. Above, you can see that the alttekpub api exposes links to several other documents: productions, new episodes and productions by category. These are identified by a rel attribute which is used to specify the link’s relationship to the enclosing document. Every document has a link that points to itself at a minimum. The last link in this example is parameterized. The api provides the various options for parameters in its document below. Here’s an alternative way you could represent the same concept, by borrowing some ideas from html:

<alttekpub>
  <links>
    <link rel="self" href="..." />
    <link rel="rels/productions" href="..." />
    <link rel="rels/new-episodes" href="..." />
  </links>
  <form method="GET" action="...">
    <select name="category">
      <option value="Microsoft">Microsoft</option>
      <option value="Ruby">Ruby</option>
      <option value="Javascript">Javascript</option>
      <option value="Mobile">Mobile</option>
    </select>
  </form>
</alttekpub>

I actually like this a little better, but I’ve seen both ideas used here and there. What is neat is that the api is self-documenting and there’s no need for the client to know how to construct uris. Everything is provided by the server. Let’s ay we follow the link for rels/productions. Here’s what we might get back:

<productions>
  <links>
    <link rel="self" href="..." />
    <link rel="next" href="..." />
  </links>
  <production>
    <name>RavenDB</name>
    <author>Oren Eini</author>
    <links>
      <link rel="self" href="..." />
      <link rel="rels/episodes" href="..." />
    </links>
  </production>
  <production>
    <name>Art of Speaking</name>
    <author>Scott Hanselman</author>
    <links>
      <link rel="self" href="..." />
      <link rel="rels/episodes" href="..." />
    </links>
  </production>
  <!--other productions elided-->
</productions>

It’s just a simple list of productions. But, there’s a couple of things to note. First, notice the rel=”next” If there are a lot of productions, the server may choose to paginate them. If that is the case, and there’s a second page, we will have a link with rel=”next” as above. We can handle paging backwards in a similar fashion. In fact, there’s a host of standard rels which you can and should leverage when it make sense. You can find them here: http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations/link-relations.xml Another thing to note, is that we’ve represented the collection of episodes in a production with another link. Following the RavenDB production’s rels/episodes link yields:

<episodes>
  <links>
    <link rel="self" href="..." />
  </links>
  <episode>
    <links>
      <link rel="self" href="" />
    </links>
    <name>Why You Should Care About RavenDB</name>
    <description>We've all heard of NoSQL...</description>
    <videos>
      <video type="video/mp4" href="..." />
      <video type="video/ogg" href="..." />
    </videos>
  </episode>
  <episode>
    <links>
      <link rel="self" href="" />
    </links>
    <name>Understanding Document Names</name>
    <description>In this short episode we explain how documents are named with RavenDB - and why.</description>
    <videos>
      <video type="video/mp4" href="..." />
      <video type="video/ogg" href="..." />
    </videos>
  </episode>
</episodes>

There’s not really anything new here. We just have basic xml with links. In the above examples, I’ve only shown a “readonly” api for a custom vendor-specific format. But, these concepts can all be expanded on to model all sorts of things through links, forms, etc. Here’s a couple of ideas you can implement to improve things further:

Use JSON instead of XML :)
Add a “title” attribute to your links. This can be used by clients to display the UI. For example, a client might scan the links in a resource and generate a series of buttons or a toolbar for each link. It could use the title attribute to populate the button’s text. Clicking the button would just activate the link. It’s very similar to the way a browser’s <a /> tag works, and if the client is coded in this way, it allows a lot of flexibility for the service author. They can evolve and extend their service with less changes needed by api consumers.
Embed resources. After recording usage data, you might discover that a request for productions is quickly followed by a request for episodes. Perhaps you can improve the api usage experience by embedding the episodes in the production documents, so only a single request is needed? There are multiple ways you can design your format to handle this situation. But you might want to consider using something that’s already been designed for this scenario, such as HAL.

The takeaway here is that a key concept in REST is hypermedia controls, which I’ve represented mostly with links (and a form). These allow the API to document itself, alleviating the need for the client to be coded with specific knowledge of link construction. It also allows the service to evolve more easily by adding additional controls over time or by completely changing uri’s or even whether or not certain related documents are embedded.

Oh..and just a reminder that I’m not a REST expert. But hopefully this example sheds some light, however dim :)

Boo-yah!!! Caliburn.Micro v1.3 RTW is Here

Rob Eisenberg — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 01:32:00 GMT

I’m extremely pleased to announce the release of Caliburn.Micro v1.3. This is a great release with many bug fixes and several API improvements. We also support several new platforms. Here’s the highlights:

Support for WP7 Mango
Support for Silverlight 5
Basic MVVM Support for WinRT/Metro
Awesome improvements to ViewModelLocator/ViewLocator which allow easier customization of conventions.
Improved Design-Time Support for Conventions

Thanks to the great community who provided awesome feedback during this release cycle. Thanks also to those who spent time to provide fixes and pull requests for bugs as well as for API improvements. I’d like to add a special thanks to Chin Bae for excellent work on making our ViewLocator and ViewModelLocator both more extensible and more accessible for common customizations.

We’re still just getting started. Enjoy the new bits and see what you can build!

How I Lost, Regained and then Turned Down an MVP Award

Rob Eisenberg — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:46:00 GMT

What Happened To Me

I’d say that 2011 was a pretty good year for me as a .NET open source developer. After all, Caliburn.Micro had it’s first official release in April 2011 just in time for the Mix Open Source fest. At the festival, the framework had a great showing. I had tons of people literally coming up to me and dumping *all* their voting tokens into my bucket. In fact there were so many people constantly standing around my booth that my bucket didn’t even get collected for counting in the official vote. Thankfully someone standing around realized this and helped to remedy the situation. Needless to say, it was a successful event. Over the next several months I did two additional non-trivial releases and then began work on the v1.3 release. I also added support for Silverlight 5, WP7 Mango and preliminary support for WinRT/Metro. Furthermore, I began refactoring the entire framework so that it could be modularized into “feature” packages allowing a variety of different uses of the framework via Nuget. I even tested CM’s EventAggregator and IoC container to make sure they would run without issue on iOS and Android devices via Unity3d. In addition to the actual framework development, I wrote documentation, blogged, fixed dozens of bugs and added new features. I also participate daily in the Caliburn.Micro forums which currently have about 1k discussions. Caliburn.Micro is now used as the core enabling framework for thousands of applications across WPF, Silverlight and various versions of WP7. Depending on the day, Caliburn/Caliburn.Micro is the second or third most trafficked Xaml-related open source project in existence.

I’m not trying to toot my own horn here. I’m just trying to set up a context. Considering the enormous amount of work in both creating the project and supporting the community…you can imagine my surprise when I received the “form letter” stating that my MVP was not being renewed because I hadn’t accomplished enough in the last 12 months….and what I did do did not “stand out” in the community. Here’s the actual quote:

“The MVP Award is presented to individuals for their past year’s contributions to online and offline communities, which stand out from others in the communities that focus on Microsoft technologies. Your contributions were diligently evaluated over the past year against the contributions of others in the Silverlight community. As a result of this evaluation, you were not awarded as a MicrosoftMVP for the January 2012 award cycle.”

Now, I’m not really “attached” to being an MVP. I don’t attach a lot of self-worth or emotional satisfaction to it. It’s a nice thing to have though. So, I was really caught off guard by this and wondered how the MVP program could come to the conclusion that I hadn’t significantly contributed in the last year.

What I Did

Being surprised as I was, and not being too fond of “generic” letters , I made one simple tweet:

“Apparently Caliburn/Caliburn.Micro and my support of it is not a ‘good enough’ contribution for Microsoft. I lost my MVP this year.”

The Community Response

Immediately following this tweet, a storm of people responded with great affection for my work and general encouragement. I want to say thank you to everyone who responded so kindly. Paired with the encouragement was a general sense of befuddlement around how the MVP program could make such a conclusion. Apparently, I wasn’t the only surprised individual.

I thought to myself “mistakes happen.” But as I was surveying the twitter-verse, I also learned that Jeremy Miller (StructureMap, FubuMVC, Storyteller) and Daniel Cazzulino (Moq) also lost their MVPs; two other prominent open source developers. Now I had had some problem during the re-evaluation process indicating my new MVP Lead clearly didn’t understand the nature of open source. When I was up for renewal, he asked me to fill out a rather ridiculous spreadsheet. If you could see it, you would notice something missing? There’s no category for Open Source!!! There’s not even a way to report it. I had this problem in previous years when I was asked to update my online MVP profile (a hideously painful UX by the way). The program uses that to evaluate you as well. Guess what? There’s no way to report Open Source work!!! Do you see a trend here?

--Start Rant

The thing that really disturbed me was that my MVP Lead didn’t know who I was or understand the nature of my contributions. What is it that an MVP Lead does anyways? I can’t tell. I get a useless mass email every week or so telling me things about Microsoft I don’t care about. Half of the time it isn’t even readable due to bad formatting, etc. My Lead never contacted me personally during the year. When I came up for renewal, I had to *defend* why I should have my award renewed using a bad Excel spreadsheet and a really bad online form which don’t even allow me to capture my real contributions. Shouldn’t it be an MVP Lead’s job to know his MVPs and what it is they are doing? Seriously. I sat down and calculated how much time it would take me to fill out the Excel form and the online form, plus writing a custom report for everything that wasn’t able to be captured via those broken mechanisms. I took that number of hours and multiplied it by my hourly consulting rate and determined that the money I would make working exceeded the material value of the MVP award. Haven’t I given enough free work to Microsoft? This isn’t a personal attack on *my* MVP Lead. I don’t know the guy. But, I wonder whether the role of MVP Lead is improperly defined or under-defined, because I know that I’m not the only person who has had this exact problem repeatedly.

--End Rant

Microsoft Employees to the Rescue

Also following my tweet, a number of Microsoft employees stepped in to investigate. I have to thank them here personally. Much thanks to you (in no particular order) Tim Heuer, Pete Brown, Joe Healey, Glenn Block and Scott Hanselman. At one point I heard that this issue had even been escalated internally to Scott Guthrie. It’s truly an honor that so many well known and respected individuals *inside* Microsoft stepped up to personally investigate my situation. Thank you again. This is a tremendously good thing and points out something of great importance. Over the years I’ve very rarely had negative experiences with individual Microsoft employees. But, I’ve almost always had bad experiences interacting with groups, programs, etc. It seams that somehow the opinions of the individuals are lost in the system. That’s a real shame.

If the opinion of many trusted Microsoft employees and the opinion of so many community members is not reflected in the MVP Award, then there certainly is a problem with the program…or I don’t understand what the program is.

An MVP Again…for a few hours

Thanks to the work of the gentlemen listed above, I was informed last night that I was being re-awarded an MVP for the 2012 year. I understand this sort of thing never happens. But, I’d already had several days to reflect on the MVP program and had several conversations with various people leading to several realizations listed above and several more detailed below. I was very unsettled.

Why I Turned Down the MVP

This morning I responded to the award email with a respectful decline. Below are some of the reasons I chose to no longer be a part of the program and why I doubt I will participate again, unless serious reform happens.

Becoming an MVP

One of the problems with the MVP program is that the whole thing is basically a mystery. Here’s where I first knock heads with the program. I value transparency and openness, even if it’s difficult or sometimes painful. The MVP program does not value openness. That’s why it’s basically a mystery how you get nominated for an MVP or what you have to do to get one. Let me do a little exposé here. In my case, I’m fairly sure that my local Developer Evangelist saw the work I was doing in the local community and submitted me. That’s a good thing and it’s probably fairly common. But what happens from there? It’s my understanding that it’s completely out of DPE’s hands at that point. Who knows? From what I can tell, if the MVP program is interested in you, you then have to submit proof of your accomplishments to them. I remember doing this. It’s not like a normal award where the organization does the work to investigate your contributions and then decides whether or not to give you an award. No. If you are being considered for nomination, you literally have to *sell* yourself to the MVP program…and selling is exactly what you are doing. Want to know why? Have you noticed that the MVP disciplines are strictly organized around internal product groups, regardless of how hindering to the particular MVP discipline it appears to be? An example of this is that Client AppDev, Silverlight, WP7 and Blend are all separate MVP groups even though they should be unified. Because they are different products, they are different MVPs (actually, they should all be the same product, but that’s a subject for another blog post). Do you know why this is? I’ll tell you: because each product group literally gets an MVP “budget” which they use to “purchase” MVPs for the year. Personally, I’m offended by this notion. But it would take drastic re-organization of the MVP program to fix it.

General Life as an MVP

Now you can just imagine how this division along product lines and MVP purchasing might affect things. Because Microsoft’s product teams are notorious for not only being non-communicative with one another but are often pitted against one another by the upper level management…the various product teams can develop a vastly different set of values and beliefs with respect to interaction both internally and with the outside world. Depending on what MVP discipline you are a part of…and the nature of your contributions…you may have a great experience or you may be in store for hell. If the product group you are associated with is open, such as ASP.NET, you can expect lots of interaction, incorporation of your feedback into the product and probably a deep respect of open source work. If your product team is something like WP7, you can expect much less communication, very little change to the product based on your feedback and probably…they don’t even know what open source is.

My Life as an MVP

As for myself, it’s clear that my major contribution is through an open source framework. What a fool I was…there’s a certain insanity in building an open source framework on top of a proprietary UI stack. Back when I was awarded the MVP, I was given the Client AppDev designation, which basically means WPF (but for some reason, contrary to what I’ve said above, also included WinForms..interesting how they had WPF and WinForms in the same group but not WPF and Silverlight…but I digress…or do I?). Back then Xaml tech wasn’t so secretive. When Silverlight came along, they moved me into that group. That group was different. Silverlight was kept tightly sealed. When I was a Client AppDev, I actually felt like Rob Relyea and John Gossman were my kin. When I became a Silverlight MVP, I felt like I was an outsider being graced with a little tiny window to peer in on things. I say all that because when I started on Caliburn, while I was working on a proprietary platform, it felt more open. But when Silverlight came along, things changed. WP7 was even worse than Silverlight…and WinRT/Metro…well…they didn’t talk to anyone. Now that Xaml has moved out of the Developer Division and into the Windows division, it’s only going to get worse.

Secret Societies

I’ve already mentioned how the organization of the MVP groups along product lines can be a hindrance to everyone. WPF, Silverlight, WP7, Metro and Blend…which are all used by the same group of people, are actually different MVP groups. As a Silverlight MVP…I had no access to anything happening with WP7. I had no knowledge of WinRT/Metro. I had no knowledge of Blend or any mechanism to directly interact with that product team. Now, Caliburn.Micro spans all of these technologies, but I could really only talk to Silverlight product team members…and a few of my old WPF comrades. But would it surprise you if I told you the organizational absurdity went even farther. Did you know there are “insiders” groups. “Insiders” for a particular product group have more privileged knowledge than MVPs and more opportunities for direct interaction. Some MVPs are also insiders, but not all. Some insiders are not MVPs. But wait, there’s more. There’s also the TAP program….which seams to have more privileged connections and knowledge. To this day, I don’t know how one gets in a TAP program. I was in the WP7 Tap for about two days. Some guys already in the program were talking in the TAP forums about getting Caliburn.Micro working on WP7. They yelled loud enough and the powers that be invited me, since it seamed that significant apps were likely to be built with my framework. Unfortunately, things went public very shortly after that and the TAP was closed. LOL. But it doesn’t end there. It seams, based on observation, that there are even more secretive groups…who pretty much know everything the product team knows. These guys don’t have a name and I don’t know how you get into that. Though, I’m pretty sure it has to do with being “chummy” to the right people. Childishness. The bottom line is that there are too many levels of secrecy and too many and the wrong types of divisions to enable an effective feedback loop. I don’t know if this is true of all MVP groups, but it was with Silverlight and it has got worse with each successive Xaml platform. Now that Xaml is in Windows, I don’t expect anyone to be able to provide decent feedback.

Fruitlessness

Since things are so improperly organized, there are really only a few occasions where one can really provide good feedback on the product. Unfortunately, after three years as an MVP, I have to say that not a single bit of feedback I provided resulted in any sort of change to the product. With the Silverlight team..and almost always with the Blend team (when I could actually run one of them down), I would get some response like “yes, we’ll have to have a conversation about that.” And I’d be thinking…”isn’t that why I’m here at the MVP summit talking to you now?” But they never seamed to want to engage in a real discussion on *anything* that affected me, my project or my clients. I had this happen every year at the summit. I had even more outrageous things happen in email and at BUILD. On the insiders email list (when I finally got on it), I tried to start a conversation about Convention over Configuration and improvements to tooling that would help support those scenarios and generally make tool extensibility better. Somehow I managed to get into a private email thread of the Blend team where they could engage me on that. You know what they said when I tried to continue the conversation? They said “we don’t want to discuss that right now.” Ok…thanks. That made me really mad. Why am I an MVP again? But the real treat was at BUILD. I managed to track down two of the Blend PMs. I first talked to the PM in charge of the JavaScript Blend work. I told him about what I was building in JavaScript. He was really interested and wanted to follow up with me on what I was building and how it would work inside Blend. Then I took several steps to the right to talk to a Blend PM working on the Xaml side of things. I tried, once again, to discuss CoC. I know for a fact these guys either don’t understand it or don’t think it’s important in software at all. Well, they listened for a moment, then I asked about improving the tooling so I could have a plugin mechanism by which to improve that scenario for my customers. They were very not-helpful. I tried to bring up issues of developer productivity and better strategies for building applications. In a nutshell, the PM basically said to me “we don’t care about developers…they aren’t part of our use cases.” I was pretty enraged by that. See how the product team’s culture affects the effectiveness of the MVP program? My main point though is that nothing I ever said or did affected any product team’s work. Nothing. It was a waste of time and energy…and an emotional drain.

MVP Quality

Now I want to tread lightly here with how I say this….not all MVPs are created equal. I’m going to be vague here. I met an MVP once for Technology X. It turned out that she had never built anything with Technology X and wasn’t overly knowledgeable about it. She liked Technology X a lot though. Each day she would scan her RSS feeds and post about 8 - 10 links on Technology X. That’s why she had her MVP. It looks good on a review doesn’t it? I blogged 365 posts on Technology X this year!! Now, I’ve met some MVPs in various areas that were brilliant and obviously contributing a lot. But, I’ve met a fair share of MVPs who not only were not experts on the technology, but didn’t make half the contribution that other developers I knew did, who were never awarded MVPs. Not all MVPs are equal. If you are an employer, or looking for a speaker, expert, consultant…whatever; you cannot assume that just because that person has an MVP that they know what they are talking about. It’s sad, but this describes a noticeable number of MVPs.

One more word on MVP quality with respect to division along product team lines. You should never hire a highly product-specific MVP to help advise you on technology choices. I hope you realize the built-in problem with that. I know very few Technology X MVPs who would tell you not to use Technology X, even if there was a better, cheaper, faster way to build your solution. Be wary.

Open Source

I just want to say a little more about this. As I mentioned, there’s nothing about the MVP program that explicitly allows for recognition of open source work. It’s hard to get nominated for it and it’s even harder to renew with it. MVP leads who play a major roll in the renewal process may not be technical at all and even may not understand Open Source. Since I’ve mentioned how MVPs are linked to product groups, you might guess that the effectiveness of your MVP as an OSS developer is entirely dependent on that particular product group’s understanding of and interest in OSS. In a group related to ASP.NET or JavaScript, developers on the team are likely to have run open source projects themselves. In a group like Silverlight or WP7, they are likely to have never done such a thing…and not even have a clear idea of what is involved. I really came face to face with this when my non-renewed MVP…got renewed. Why? Well, it felt like a sort of “benefit of the doubt” renewal. Here’s the advice I was given from the renewal email, elided:

EDIT: I removed this quotation because a good friend of mine was honest enough to remind me that quoting a personal email is neither professional nor polite. I repent of that.

--Start Rant

What!? I released one of the most popular Xaml-related OSS project this year. I did multiple version releases, nuget packages, podcasts, documentation, forum support…the list goes on. What more do you want from me? And what should I do next year…because Caliburn.Micro is so popular, that in order for me to do something bigger for next year…I’d have to dump it entirely….completely abandoned it and build something totally different…something even more popular for Silverlight!? How could I do that to my community? That’s not even nice. No, in 2012, I’m going to continue to fix bugs, add features, add platform support and do awesome things with Caliburn.Micro. I love my own community and I’m going to continue to work hard and support them.

--End Rant

Now this kind of comment clearly expresses a deep lack of understanding for both the value of a project like Caliburn.Micro and the amount of time and resources it takes to maintain both the project and the community. If your OSS project is successful, it’s not just something you do one year and then move on to something else the next. In fact, building the first version of Caliburn.Micro was the easy part! It’s everything that’s happened afterwards and what is happening now that is hard work and will continue to be.

Unfortunately, Microsoft just doesn’t have a way of recognizing OSS developers who improve their platform. The MVP program doesn’t do this and the product teams may not either. In fact, Balmer has explicitly said he isn’t creating any policy around OSS…he’s totally dodging it entirely. This leaves the decision up to the individual teams…which sometimes goes well, but often times does not. That’s irresponsible leadership.

Career Affects

No one ever hired me as a consultant because I had an MVP. They hired me because of my open source work and my recognized expertise in UI architecture. The company I’m working for…I don’t even think they know what an MVP is. They hired me because they know *me* and know I can help them with their particular problem. I would say the personal career benefits of having an MVP are a wash except…

With Microsoft’s less than above the bar treatment and communication about Silverlight over the last year or so, you might imagine this could effect MVPs associated with the program. I’ve heard a lot of horrible stories in the last year. I didn’t have anything terribly bad happen to my business, but I was quite embarrassed recently. I was attending a .NET user group meeting, of which I am the president. Somehow I or someone else mentioned that I was a Silverlight MVP. I don’t remember the detail about how it came up, but I do remember what happened next. Someone laughed at me. Literally, I was made fun of because my MVP had the word Silverlight attached to it. Now, I’m just not willing to endure mockery for the sake of Silverlight, especially since I understood exactly why he was laughing at me. It has got to where being a “Silverlight” MVP is bad for my career.

My Happiness

Looking over the last three years, I’ve definitely been a less happy, more frustrated developer. I’m sure it’s linked to the sort of fake “value” being a Silverlight MVP gave me. Basically, they give you a couple of cheep gifts, then they pretend to listen to your feedback, while not actually doing anything. Year after year of that and you get really unhappy. It’s demoralizing. You start to realize that you really are a commodity. You are purchased by a product group and kept around as long as they perceive they need you…your feedback is allowed, but not effective. Again, it’s probably not the case for all MVPs, it depends on the groups. I just don’t need that in my life.

Conclusion

I’m saying goodbye to the MVP program even after I was re-offered the award for 2012. If you’ve read this far, you can probably see why I made that decision. I’m really positive about the future of Caliburn.Micro and hopeful regarding my JavaScript framework. I think 2012 is going to be a wonderful year. If someone seriously reforms the MVP program or if Microsoft decides to properly recognize and reward open source efforts, then, maybe I’ll let them give me an award. But for now, I don’t need to suffer any more. I’m free and I’m going to do great things.

If you BUILD it…

Rob Eisenberg — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:22:35 GMT

Next week is Microsoft’s new BUILD conference. It should be very interesting. If you are attending, I’d love to meet you. I look like this. If you are a Caliburn.Micro user, I’d love to discuss your work and your experience with the framework. See you there!

Caliburn.Micro v1.2 RTW and Nuget Feature Packages!

Rob Eisenberg — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 17:40:00 GMT

Today, I’m pleased to announce the RTW of Caliburn.Micro v1.2. In this release we’ve had a number of bug fixes as well as a few incremental feature additions and refactorings. You can read the list of changes on the project site or get it as part of the download. Of course, v1.2 is now available through Nuget as well.

In addition to the standard release, I’m happy to announce something new we are doing with Caliburn.Micro: Feature Packages. Feature Packages allow developers a way pick and choose only the features they want from Caliburn.Micro and not have to take a dependency on other unused features of the framework. This allows for smaller Silverlight and WP7 applications as well as the ability to use some Caliburn.Micro features outside of the scope of a Xaml-application at all. Currently, we only have three feature packages available, but those will likely expand in the future.

Here’s a list of all the official Caliburn.Micro related packages on Nuget:

Caliburn.Micro – The full framework compiled into an assembly.

Caliburn.Micro.Container – The Caliburn.Micro inversion of control container (IoC), provided as a source code drop-in.

Caliburn.Micro.EventAggregator – The Caliburn.Micro event aggregator, provided as a source code drop-in.

Caliburn.Micro.INPC – The Caliburn.Micro INPC infrastructure: PropertyChangedBase, BindableCollection, Execute.OnUIThread and InDesignMode checking, provided as a source code drop-in.

Interestingly, by combing the container, event aggregator and INPC packages, you basically get something equivalent to MVVMLight Toolkit. So, if you are looking to get started with the absolute minimal needed to do MVVM, we have a solution for you. Naturally, it’s source-code-identical to Caliburn.Micro, which means you can upgrade from any combination of feature packages to the full framework without having to change a line of your code.

Happy app-building!

Caliburn.Micro Soup to Nuts Part 9–New WP7 Features

Rob Eisenberg — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 17:23:00 GMT

In version 1.0 we had pretty good support for building apps for WP7, but in v1.1 we’ve taken things up a notch. Let’s look at the same HelloWP7 sample that we did previously, but see how it’s been updated to take advantage of our improved tombstoning, launcher/chooser support and strongly typed navigation. You’ll also notice that the code is cleaner overall.

Bootstrapper

Here’s the cleaned up boostrapper in v1.1.

public class HelloWP7Bootstrapper : PhoneBootstrapper {
    PhoneContainer container;

    protected override void Configure() {
        container = new PhoneContainer(RootFrame);

        container.RegisterPhoneServices();
        container.PerRequest<MainPageViewModel>();
        container.PerRequest<PivotPageViewModel>();
        container.PerRequest<TabViewModel>();

        AddCustomConventions();
    }

    static void AddCustomConventions() {
        //ellided
    }

    protected override object GetInstance(Type service, string key) {
        return container.GetInstance(service, key);
    }

    protected override IEnumerable<object> GetAllInstances(Type service) {
        return container.GetAllInstances(service);
    }

    protected override void BuildUp(object instance) {
        container.BuildUp(instance);
    }
}

There are two things to notice here. First, we’ve removed all the manual Caliburn.Micro service configuration and pushed it into the SimpleContainer. That gives you one line of code to configure the framework if you are using the OOTB container. Speaking of which, we now provide the SimpleContainer officially in the Caliburn.Micro.Extensions assembly. That helps you get started faster. You can always plug your own in, of coarse. In addition to the simplified configuration, notice that the ViewModels for pages are no longer registered using a string key. For v1.1 our ViewModelLocator has been re-implemented to pull VMs from the container by Type rather than key. It now follows the exact same naming strategies as the ViewLocator (but in reverse) and even derives possible interface names so that it resolves VMs from the container correctly. This both improves the consistency of ViewModel location as well as makes the configuration simpler.

The boostrapper is added to your App.xaml as always:

<Application x:Class="Caliburn.Micro.HelloWP7.App"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             xmlns:local="clr-namespace:Caliburn.Micro.HelloWP7">
    <Application.Resources>
        <local:HelloWP7Bootstrapper x:Key="bootstrapper" />
    </Application.Resources>
</Application>

Important Note About App.xaml.cs

If you create your WP7 application using a standard Visual Studio template, the generated App.xaml.cs file will have a lot of code in it. The purpose of this code is to set up the root frame for the application and make sure everything gets initialized properly. Of course, that's what the bootstrapper's job is too (and in fact it does a few things better than the out-of-the-box code in addition to configuring CM). So, you don't need both. When using CM's PhoneBootstrapper, be sure to clear out all the code from the App.xaml.cs file except for the call to InitializeComponent in the constructor.

INavigationService

Let’s review what CM’s INavigationService does for you. First, remember that WP7 enforces a View-First approach to UI at the platform level. Like it or not, the platform is going to create pages at will and the Frame control is going to conduct your application thusly. You don’t get to control that and there are no extensibility points, unlike the Silverlight version of the navigation framework. Rather than fight this, I’m going to recommend embracing the View-First approach for Pages in WP7, but maintaining a Model-First composition strategy for the sub-components of those pages and a Model-First approach to coding against the navigation system. In order to bridge this gap, I’ve enabled the INavigationService to hook into the native navigation frame’s functionality and augment it with the following behaviors:

When Navigating To a Page

Use the new ViewModelLocator to conventionally determine the Type of the VM that should be attached to the page being navigated to. Pull that VM by Type out of the container.
If a VM is found, use the ViewModelBinder to connect the Page to the located ViewModel.
Examine the Page’s QueryString. Look for properties on the VM that match the QueryString parameters and inject them, performing the necessary type coercion.
If the ViewModel implements the IActivate interface, call its Activate method.

When Navigating Away From a Page

Detect whether the associated ViewModel implements the IGuardClose interface.
If IGuardClose is implemented and the app is not being tombstoned or closed, invoke the CanClose method and use its result to optionally cancel page navigation.¹
If the ViewModel can close and implements the IDeactivate interface, call it’s Deactivate method. Always pass “false” to indicate that the VM should deactivate, but not necessarily close. This is because the phone may be deactivating, but not actually tombstoning or closing. There’s no way to know.

The behavior of the navigation service allows the correct VM to be hooked up to the page, allows that VM to be notified that it is being navigated to (IActivate), allows it to prevent navigation away from the current page (IGuardClose) and allows it to clean up after itself on navigation away, tombstoning or normal “closing” of the application (IDeactivate). All these interfaces (and a couple more) are implemented by the Screen class. If you prefer not to inherit from Screen, you can implement any of the interfaces individually of coarse. They provide a nice View-Model-Centric, testable and predictable way of responding to navigation without needing to wire up a ton of event handlers or write important application flow logic in the page’s code-behind.

These hooks into phone navigation enable a really smooth way of interacting with the phone’s navigation lifecycle. But now that we have an improved ViewModelLocator that matches exactly the ViewLocator and works on types, we can take things further. In v1.1 we’ve introduced support for strongly-typed navigation. Here’s what the new MainPageViewModel from the sample looks like using this new feature:

public class MainPageViewModel {
    readonly INavigationService navigationService;

    public MainPageViewModel(INavigationService navigationService) {
        this.navigationService = navigationService;
    }

    public void GotoPageTwo() {
        navigationService.UriFor<PivotPageViewModel>()
            .WithParam(x => x.NumberOfTabs, 5)
            .Navigate();
    }
}

This allows you to specify a ViewModel to navigate to along with the query string parameters. Since this all happens using generics and lambdas, you can never miss-type a page Uri or mess up your query strings….and refactoring will work beautifully.

For the sake of completeness, here’s the page that will be bound to MainPageViewModel:

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage x:Class="Caliburn.Micro.HelloWP7.MainPage"
                            xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
                            xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
                            xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
                            xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
                            xmlns:cal="clr-namespace:Caliburn.Micro;assembly=Caliburn.Micro"
                            SupportedOrientations="Portrait"
                            Orientation="Portrait"
                            shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True">
    <Grid Background="Transparent">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />
            <RowDefinition Height="*" />
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <StackPanel Grid.Row="0"
                    Margin="24,24,0,12">
            <TextBlock Text="WP7 Caliburn.Micro"
                       Style='{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}' />
            <TextBlock Text='Main Page'
                       Margin='-3,-8,0,0'
                       Style='{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}' />
        </StackPanel>

        <Grid Grid.Row='1'>
            <Button x:Name='GotoPageTwo'
                    Content='Goto Page Two' />
        </Grid>
    </Grid>

    <phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>
        <shell:ApplicationBar IsVisible='True'>
            <shell:ApplicationBar.Buttons>
                <cal:AppBarButton IconUri='ApplicationIcon.png'
                                  Text='Page Two'
                                  Message='GotoPageTwo' />
            </shell:ApplicationBar.Buttons>
        </shell:ApplicationBar>
    </phone:PhoneApplicationPage.ApplicationBar>
</phone:PhoneApplicationPage>

There’s really nothing new here in v1.1. But I just wanted to remind you that Caliburn.Micro supports Actions on the AppBar as long as you use CM’s AppBarButton and AppBarMenuItem :)

IPhoneService

The IPhoneService wraps the phone’s frame and provides access to important information and events. We had this service in v1.0 but we’ve expanded it in v1.1 to expose a better event model. Those familiar with WP7 know that the phone has a series of events that fire in different circumstances: Launching, Activated, Deactivated and Closing. Unfortunately, these events obscure whether the phone is actually resurrecting from a tombstoned state or simply continuing execution. The current SDK does not make it easy for the developer to actually determine this, so Caliburn.Micro does the heavy lifting for you and provides the following event model:

Launching - Occurs when a fresh instance of the application is launching.
Activated - Occurs when a previously paused/tombstoned app is resumed/resurrected.
Deactivated - Occurs when the application is being paused or tombstoned.
Closing - Occurs when the application is closing.
Continuing - Occurs when the app is continuing from a temporarily paused state.
Continued - Occurs after the app has continued from a temporarily paused state.
Resurrecting - Occurs when the app is "resurrecting" from a tombstoned state.
Resurrected - Occurs after the app has "resurrected" from a tombstoned state.

Using these new events, you can more intelligently make decisions about whether or not you need to restore data. In the forthcoming Mango release, the platform will provide us information on whether the app is continuing or resurrecting. However, developers working with Caliburn.Micro can have that information now and when Mango arrives, we’ll update our implementation to use the new bits. Your code won’t have to change.

Tombstoning

As you might imagine, our new tombstoning mechanism takes advantage of the new events so that it can more reliably and accurately save/restore important data. Let’s have a look at the PivotPageViewModel to see how it interacts with the tombstoning mechanism.

public class PivotPageViewModel : Conductor<IScreen>.Collection.OneActive {
    readonly Func<TabViewModel> createTab;

    public PivotPageViewModel(Func<TabViewModel> createTab) {
        this.createTab = createTab;
    }

    public int NumberOfTabs { get; set; }

    protected override void OnInitialize() {
        Enumerable.Range(1, NumberOfTabs).Apply(x => {
            var tab = createTab();
            tab.DisplayName = "Item " + x;
            Items.Add(tab);
        });

        ActivateItem(Items[0]);
    }
}

The PivotPageViewModel will receive the number of pivot items to create through it’s NumberOfTabs property, which is pushed in from the query string, as mentioned above. It will then add these items to the conductor and activate the first one. If you’re familiar with the Pivot and CM’s previous sample, you’ll notice that our PivotFix is gone. Pivot has a horrible bug that will crash your application if you try to set the SelectedItem or SelectedIndex to an item 3 or greater from either end of the pivot collection, while the Pivot itself is not visible. This makes it really hard to restore this control from a tombstoned state because you have to set the value at the exact right time. Previously we used a PivotFix hack to work around the control’s bug, but the new tombstoning mechanism is powerful and extensible enough to just make it work. You’ll notice that there are no attributes describing tombstoning behavior. They’ve been removed in favor of a poco model inspired by Fluent NHibhernate. If you would rather have the attributes, you can actually build them on top of the new system. The new system is also more reliable than previously and has a lot more options for storage. Let’s see the class that describes the tombstoning behavior for PivotPageViewModel:

public class PivotPageModelStorage : StorageHandler<PivotPageViewModel> {
    public override void Configure() {
        this.ActiveItemIndex()
            .InPhoneState()
            .RestoreAfterViewLoad();
    }
}

All you have to do to make a class participate in tombstoning is to inherit from StorageHandler<T>. The PhoneContainer will auto-register anything of this type in the assembly. Just override the Configure method and declare the tombstoning instructions. I’ve created some extension methods for common scenarios. Here’s what the above declaration states:

-Persist the Conductor’s ActiveItem’s index
-Store the index in PhoneState
-Restore the value after the associated view has been loaded.

Let’s look at the storage handler for the TabViewModel to see some more options:

public class TabViewModelStorage : StorageHandler<TabViewModel> {
    public override void Configure() {
        Id(x => x.DisplayName);

        Property(x => x.Text)
            .InPhoneState()
            .RestoreAfterActivation();
    }
}

Here we are specifying an Id because we actually need to persist multiple instances of the same VM. When we restore, we’ll need to know how to map the properties back. We’re also storing the data in PhoneState, but this time we’re not waiting for the view to load, but just waiting for the TabViewModel to be activated by its owning Conductor.

Out of the box, we also support storing data in AppSettings. For example, if you wanted to same tab to be selected *across application restarts* not just when tombstoned, you could define the PivotPageModelStorage like this:

public class PivotPageModelStorage : StorageHandler<PivotPageViewModel> {
    public override void Configure() {
        this.ActiveItemIndex()
            .InAppSettings()
            .RestoreAfterViewLoad();
    }
}

Pretty easy? All this works by collaborating with the IoC container and keying off of the new event model exposed by the IPhoneService. It’s pretty powerful and extensible. You can add your own storage mechanism or define your own restore timing. You can even implement IStorageHandler directly to write completely custom code on a class by class basis. You could easily add a version that inspected classes for custom attributes and built up the configuration, if you like the attribute model better. You can also store whole instances, not just their properties, and have them rehydrated properly and available for ctor injection.

Launchers and Choosers

Launchers and Choosers are painful to work with if you want to do MVVM. In v1.0 we provided a solution to this. I wasn’t happy with its implementation…it was unpredictable in certain scenarios. Once we established the new phone events, better IoC integration and new tombstoning mechanism, I realized I could build a better launcher/chooser system. Let’s take a look at the updated version of TabViewModel in order to see how it works:

public class TabViewModel : Screen, IHandle<TaskCompleted<PhoneNumberResult>> {
    string text;
    readonly IEventAggregator events;

    public TabViewModel(IEventAggregator events) {
        this.events = events;
    }

    public string Text {
        get { return text; }
        set {
            text = value;
            NotifyOfPropertyChange(() => Text);
        }
    }

    public void Choose() {
        events.RequestTask<PhoneNumberChooserTask>();
    }

    public void Handle(TaskCompleted<PhoneNumberResult> message) {
        MessageBox.Show("The result was " + message.Result.TaskResult, DisplayName, MessageBoxButton.OK);
    }

    protected override void OnActivate() {
        events.Subscribe(this);
        base.OnActivate();
    }

    protected override void OnDeactivate(bool close) {
        events.Unsubscribe(this);
        base.OnDeactivate(close);
    }
}

The most significant architectural change I made was to re-implement the launcher/chooser mechanism to work on top of the IEventAggregator. Take a look at the Choose method. The RequestTask method is just an extension method of the IEventAggregator that publishes a special event that the framework is subscribed to. The framework then starts the task. When it’s completed, the framework publishes an event TaskCompleted<T> where T is the result the the chooser returns. You can register for this in the same VM that published the chooser event or in an entirely different one if you like. In the case of our sample, we have 5 TabViewModels that can launch the same chooser. That’s probably not normal, but you can handle this situation in three ways. In our case, the VMs are in a Conductor, and only one of them can be active at a time, so we just Subscribe/Unsubscribe based on the Screen lifecycle so that only the active VM will receive the result. This is a version of the Latch pattern. The second way to handle this is through the event state. When you call the RequestTask method you can pass a state object which you can use for identification purposes later. Yes, this will be present even if the chooser causes a tombstone event. The final way is to have a single object that registers for the completed event, decoupling the launching from the completion. Thus multiple VM could launch the same chooser, but only one class would handle the result.

IWindowManager

The IWindowManager was actually in v1.0, as a last minute addition. It’s a really easy way to show native-looking, custom message boxes or modal dialogs. You can also use it to show popups. We’ll talk more about the window manager, on all platforms, in the next post.

Referenced Samples

Caliburn.Micro.HelloWP7

Footnotes

Even though the IGuardClose interface was designed to handle async scenarios, you must use it synchronously in WP7. This is due to a flaw in the design of Silverlight Navigation Framework which doesn’t account for async shutdown scenarios.