orktane

Couple of days ago I published a sample app in Silverlight that fronted Netflix’s oData API – well, now I’ve ported the same app into WPF again making use of nRoute Framework. It like before demonstrates how you can build an end-to-end application using nRoute’s navigation framework and MVVM related features-set on WPF. 
 

As this is just a port, the preceding Silverlight based step-by-step guide is fully applicable here; besides templating and some implementation details the through-process is about equivalent – and so in this post I won't go through the nitty-gritty of designing the app, rather I’ll just discuss the broader ideas, issues I faced, and changes I had to make to up-port it to WPF. More...

With the latest release of nRoute we’ve added a trove of navigation-related features, to explain and demonstrate these features I’ve put together an end-to-end application that fronts the Netflix’s oData Catalog. And so in this post we’ll go through using these feature in a step-by-step manner to cumulatively compose a rich, extensible, and loosely-coupled application. Here is what we are going after:

View the nRoute’s Netflix App (note you can also install the application on your desktop).

Guide Scope

Right off the bat, let me be clear, this post does not show you how to consume oData services or explain how to design iPad’ish UIs or troll on the virtues of MVVM – it purely concentrates on plugging-in nRoute’s navigation and related features to compose our demo app. Familiarity with nRoute concepts is not a must, but will be much helpful. Secondly, just as I finalized this post, Netflix switched from a purely server-side paging-model to a hybrid client-server paging-model so I had to revisit the code, hence there might be a bit of mismatch from what’s shown here and the actual code.

Step 1. Application Setup

For our application we’ll split up the solution into two projects, one the main Silverlight (xap) application and the other a class library which will hold the Netflix service. And so first, in our data project we need to add a service reference to the Netfix oData Catalog.

We also need to need to add references to nRoute, so in both our Silverlight projects we add references to nRoute.Framework.dll, along with its dependencies System.Observable and System.Windows.Interactivity. And lastly you need to cross-reference the data project to the main application project. More...