Caliburn.Micro MVVM Framework

Caliburn.Micro is a small, yet powerful framework, designed for building applications across all Xaml Platforms. With strong support for MVVM and other proven UI patterns, Caliburn.Micro will enable you to build your solution quickly, without the need to sacrifice code quality or testability.

Download from here and it's also available at NuGet

.NET 3.5 Installation Problems in Windows 8

Windows 8 installs with .NET 4.5. A default installation of Windows 8 doesn't seem to include .NET 3.0 or 3.5, although .NET 2.0 does seem to be available by default (presumably because Windows has app dependencies on that). I ran into some pretty nasty compatibility issues regarding .NET 3.5 which I'll describe in this post.

I'll preface this by saying that depending on how you install Windows 8 you may not run into these issues. In fact, it's probably a special case, but one that might be common with developer folks reading my blog. Specifically it's the install order that screwed things up for me -  installing Visual Studio before explicitly installing .NET 3.5 from Windows Features - in particular. If you install Visual Studio 2010 I highly recommend you install .NET 3.5 from Windows features BEFORE you install Visual Studio 2010 and save yourself the trouble I went through.

So when I installed Windows 8, and then looked at the Windows Features to install after the fact in the Windows Feature dialog, I thought - .NET 3.5 - who needs it. I'd be happy to not have to install .NET 3.5, but unfortunately I found out quite a while after initial installation that one of my applications/tools (DevExpress's awesome CodeRush) depends on it and won't install without it.

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JulMar MVVM Helpers + Behaviors For Windows 8 RTM

The MVVM Helper + Behavior library is a set of classes for developers to help them build Model-View-ViewModel oriented applications. It includes some useful classes, a base framework for MVVM and a bunch of Blend behaviors, triggers and actions.

There are several examples available at http://www.julmar.com/blog/mark where I've been blogging on how to use this library. I'll push some of that information up here as well.

You can install MVVMHelpers through NuGet http://www.nuget.org - just search for MVVMHelpers, it will add the latest version into your project automatically from within Visual Studio if you install the NuGet plug-in.

Alternatively, you can type the following into the Package Manager console to add it to your project:

PM> Install-Package Install-Package MVVMHelpers.Metro

Download DLL from here
Source code for MVVMHelpers for Windows 8 Metro

Using OData in Windows 8 Apps for Windows 8 RTM

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of my book, Building Windows 8 Apps with C# and XAML.

The Open Data Procotol (OData) is a web protocol used for querying and updating data. It is a REST-based API built on top of Atom that uses JSON or XML for transporting information. Windows 8 applications have native support for OData clients once you download and install the client from here

To access OData services, you simply add a service reference the same way you would for a SOAP-based web service. A popular OData service to use for demonstrations is the Netflix movie catalog. You can browse the service directly by typing http://odata.netflix.com/catalog/ into your browser. In most browsers you should see an XML document that contains various tags for collections you may browse. For example, the collection referred to as Titles indicates you can browse all titles using the URL, http://odata.netflix.com/catalog/Titles.

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