.NET

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.

Nearly every application I write has a project called ConsoleDriver in it. This project is almost always the same as it is just a main routine that create the class that starts my program, wraps it in an exception block, usually configures logging, and waits until I hit enter or CTRL-C to signal the application to exit.