Introduce Caliburn

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Introduce Caliburn.Micro

Overview

In this step, the standard WPF project will be transformed to support the Caliburn.Micro MVVM Framework. A WPF project uses app.xaml to start the application, while MainWindow.xaml is the startup window. For Caliburn.Micro, a class will be introduced that will setup the application. It then will invoke the startup ViewModel and View. In Caliburn.Micro you start the ViewModels. The framework will then try to find an appropriate view and activate the view.

So, in this chapter we do a few things:

1. Adapt the App.xaml class so it uses Bootstrapper.cs instead of MainWindow.xaml as string point for your code.
2. Create your first ViewModel, named ShellViewModel.cs as the startup ViewModel for your application.
3. Create the first View, named ShellView.xaml.
4. Create a class called Bootstrapper.cs which contains all startup logic.
5. Delete MainWindow.xaml, you no longer need this.

Alternatively, you can rename MainWindow.xaml to ShellView.xaml and move it to the Views folder. This may be a good strategy to migrate existing applications.

Essentially, you need to perform the same steps to migrate an existing WPF application to a Caliburn.Micro application. Of course, this does not make the application and MVVM application.

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