Today's post is written by Kiran Balijepalli, a Microsoft Technical Evangelist for Windows Phone. He has more than 16 years of global technology leadership experience in desktop, web, cloud and mobile platforms. You can find all of Kiran's Microsoft Student blogs here, and he can be found on Twitter as @KiranKBee.
Welcome to the Part 2 of my blog series for developing for Windows Phone. In the previous blogs we started from the Getting Started Guide, learned the importance of idea exploration and the need for sketching the idea as navigational map. Then we looked into the various tools and technologies that come as part of the Visual Studio IDE and Windows phone SDK, etc. We also explored the advantages of numerous pre designed templates available on Windows Phone platform. We looked at the options of creating games using XNA, C++ (DirectX), we also explored the section on multi resolution, capabilities, Windows live tile guidelines and icon guidelines.
I encourage you to explore the live links and resources provided for your advantage, remember your app is your mark! It is only possible when you put high quality and immersing user experience at the forefront of design.
In this blog let us explore the MVVM pattern & XAML design style, here are five things to know:
- XAML is a declarative language, as part of the UI definition it contains data binding, state management, and triggers.
- MVVM (Model-View-View Model) is a framework for clean separation of logic, data, and UI elements.
- MVVM allows you to define the user interface layer for XAML based applications, defines a view model that represents both a data model and behavior for views, and allows views to bind to the view model.
- The data bound app template in Visual Studio 2012 helps you to achieve that in a much simpler and faster way.
- The other great advantage of the template is its “blendability" to create and edit the user layout in Blend and creating some run time design data etc. Let us talk about it more in detail so just go ahead and create a new windows phone data bound app as shown below name it as myDataBoundApp, click “Ok” chose the required WP platform target.
Build and run the solution and play around with the app in emulator. Also take a dig at the Visual Studio solution explorer and what additional folders and files are created in the solution explorer. This template is a good example of how MVVM apps are built we will discuss the depth of MVVM in the next blogs.