One Dev Job

Today marks the RC1 release of the BindableApplicationBar. I have spent some time today to do some StyleCop and documentation cleanup and it seems ready. You can grab a zip file with the binary directly from here.

Another part of what I have been working on today is a Windows Phone application template. I have spent too many times working on boilerplate code and cleaning up the default Windows Phone Application template and decided to create something that will get me up to speed faster every time I want to create a phone app. It is called Windows Phone Prism Application and is available as a Visual Studio project template here.

Just download the zip file, unpack and run install.cmd or simply copy the template zip file to your “%USERPROFILE%\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Templates\ProjectTemplates” folder. You can now create a new Windows Phone application based on this template simply by creating a new project and choosing this template:

The template has contents as listed below and features:

• Prism and BindableApplicationBar libraries
• AssemblyAttributes class that simplifies access to information about your application
• PageNavigation class that encapsulates all page navigation URIs and methods in one file
• LocalizedResources class that is used in your XAML files to localize all strings
• ViewModelLocator class for exposing your view models in XAML
• Button and MenuItem view models for use with the BindableApplicationBar
• Page view models
• About page with some basic details about your application
• All StyleCop clean with only a few rules disabled

After creating the project you need to replace “Default Company” with the name of your company. I probably should have used $registeredorganization$ template parameter, but since my copy of Visual Studio is not registered to an organization – it remains empty which makes it harder to fix it in code later, than just doing a Ctrl+Shift+R.

Until today – every time I wanted to create an MVVM phone app I had to spend lots of time doing the boilerplate work. Hopefully this will let me start working on actual features of phone applications sooner.

Posts regarding Bindable ApplicationBar

1. The quest for a Bindable ApplicationBar – Part 1
2. The quest for a Bindable ApplicationBar – Part 2
3. The quest for a Bindable ApplicationBar – Part 3
4. BindableApplicationBar RC1 + Windows Phone Prism Application Template
5. BindableApplicationBar for Windows Phone – Now On NuGet