After being absent for a while, I proudly anounce my participation in a Silverlight-Framework-Competition. The framework is called Caliburn Micro, an outstanding MVVM-framework for building applications in Silverlight (I already posted about the framework in this entry). My contribution is called MediaOwl, and it is a music and movie search engine, but above all, it is a Microsoft Silverlight 4 application, that shows how to use Caliburn Micro.

I have to point out that it is a sample application, not a real-world-application. That means you can look at this app and its code and get smart, and not that it is for reliable use. But anyway, you can try the app on this site!

As I published MediaOwl under MIT-license, you can even download the source code on Codeplex. If you find any errors, please leave me a message (e-mail, comment on Codeplex, letter... I appreciate everything!).

That's it for now! Ra

Some weeks ago, I blogged about Cinch V2. I had the intention to investigate this MVVM-Framework more, but since then, no more articles or docs have unfortunately been published. I decided to continue my quest for the ultimate MVVM-Framework. And so I came along Caliburn Micro (CM).

Many of us may remember Caliburn V1, which had some (doubtless) ingenious implementations of hardly understandable patterns. In my opinion and for my purpose, it was easier to use as PRISM (aka CAG). And though there were docs and tuts, it was quite hard to keep the overview. After a while .NET 4 was released with some interesting features, and Rob Eisenberg (father of Caliburn) decided to improve Caliburn and work on a second version of his framework. And after his incredible contribution at MIX10, he decided to build a small (2000 LOC!) framework with great features, targetting WPF, Silverlight and WP7, and if that's not enough, it should also be easy to understand.

Caliburn Micro has key features like Action Message, Action Conventions, Binding Convention, Screens and Conductors, Event Aggregator, Coroutines and much more. If you don't know what these features mean, read Rob's introduction.

Currently, a documentation with basic samples is in progress, and the discussion-board on codeplex is quite active. I really love to work with CM, due to its Conventions, Screenmanagement and Action- and Couroutinehandling. That's simply great work of Rob Eisenberg, because it means no work for the developer.

Everyone, who searches for a helping hand developing clean applications in WPF/SL/SP7, should consider using Caliburn Micro. That's basically what I wanted to say!