Caliburn.Micro – UI Patterns For Solving Real-World Problems

Caliburn.Micro is somewhat interesting. Billed as “A small, yet powerful implementation of Caliburn designed for WPF, Silverlight and WP7. The framework implements a variety of UI patterns for solving real-world problems. Patterns that are enabled include MVC, MVP, Presentation Model (MVVM), and Application Controller.”, and hence somewhat of a replacement for Prism. Of particular interest:

• One of the benefits of Caliburn is simplification – specifically around auto-binding of views (V) to view models (VM). Ties between V and VM are based on naming convention e.g. MainViewModel and MainView. Binding of properties is along the x:Name lines.
• One of the downsides of Prism was the IModule, which often got polluted. Caliburn doesn’t require the IModule.
• Visual components (XAML) have to be registered with caliburn’s AssemblySource – via the bootstrapper

<Application x:Class="AlgoVisualizer.App"
             xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
             xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
             xmlns:MEF="clr-namespace:Caliburn.Micro.Contrib.MEF;assembly=Caliburn.Micro.Contrib">
    <Application.Resources>
        <ResourceDictionary>
            <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
                <ResourceDictionary>
                    <MEF:MefCaliburnBootstrapper x:Key="bootstrapper"/>
                </ResourceDictionary>
            </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
        </ResourceDictionary>
    </Application.Resources>
</Application>

    public class MefCaliburnBootstrapper : Bootstrapper<IShell>
    {
        protected override void Configure()
        {
    ...
   }

• Most people are aware of the ObserverableCollections UI thread issues, Caliburn resolves this with BindableCollection.
• IWindowManager is quite nice with its ShowWindow method.
• ActionMessages offer bind UI triggers (e.g. ‘Click’ event) to methods on the VM

Finally, the project is active, and full source code is available.

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~ by mdavey on January 14, 2011.