Posts

I was going to call this post ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love MEF .’, but I am not sure enough people would get the reference. Besides, it would put the focus too much on MEF , and not on Caliburn.Micro , which is the topic of the post.

In this post we are going to create a simple WPF application using Caliburn.Micro . I have created an empty Visual Studio 2010 solution for all the projects in this blog series. All of the code for this series will be available on my Github Learning Caliburn.Micro repository. But I suggest you follow along, and try and do it yourself.

I have used a number of different MVVM frameworks, and none has so-far felt right. Not the worlds most scientific criteria, I will grant you, but still one that I consider valid. I have a preference for lighter-weight frameworks. Another vague criteria, but my definition of it is simple – frameworks that do not impose rigid structures and significant bloat to my application by adding features I don’t need. Some of the frameworks I have worked with are: Cinch , MEFedMVVM , MVVM Light Toolkit , and Caliburn . I have tried others, but not to extent I have with these four. Of those, MEFedMVVM and MVVM Light Toolkit felt the closest to right, but were lacking some of things I like in Cinch and Caliburn .

I really like MEF and I really like proper IoC containers (let the flames begin). I do not think they are mutually exclusive, but best suited for different goals. I consider MEF to be a great way to perform macro level componentization. In other words, it is a way to wire up components that are physically in different assemblies, but it is not well suited for the micro level componentization in which I need to wire up my dependencies within my application.

Software quality is the great white whale of the software industry. We often seek it, but are totally unprepared to do anything about it. As in the tale by Melville, we can point out our Captain Ahab’s who are driven towards the extremes in ensuring quality. We also have the rest of the world that gets by not even thinking about it, except to say we know someone who knows someone that heard someone else talk about it in the dark corners of tavern once. It is one of the most critical facets of a successful software project, yet most teams are willing to cut corners in quality to meet other goals. In my experience, quality is often the second area where team resources are cut, right after documentation.