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Continuing with my efforts to showcase how to create end-to-end applications using nRoute, this time we have a Windows Phone 7 (WP7) based board game called Square Away. It is actually one game out of a multi-game application I'm creating for WP7, and is based on the "Bubble Breaker" theme. To create the game we'll use the MVVM pattern, creating all the three triads and then use nRoute to bring together everything into one squarely game.

A word of caution, this is not a super optimized application and is clearly designed to showcase what nRoute has to offer rather than creating an end-user application.  More...

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...

Post the new of release of nRoute, I've updated and upgraded seven sample applications from earlier releases to the latest version.

1. Future Desktop 2 [Silverlight 4, nRoute.Framework]

 
Future Desktop was the first ever demo-app for nRoute in Silverlight 2, and since then we've come a long way - as a metric for progress consider in upgrading to the latest release of nRoute we've managed to cut the code count by half. Also, I could sense two non-quantifiable improvements, one nRoute is a lot less invasive as it generally stays out by the way of attributes. Secondly within Views, use of Blend based behaviors is a lot more productive than having to fiddle with xaml directly.

As can be seen on the right, I've added bit of the UI functionality - basically, now you can add, close, and refresh workspaces. However, I've removed the browser-shell integration functionality, which allowed you to navigate back or forward directly from the browser's shell - I did this because nRoute is now using Silverlight's built-in Browser History Manager which unfortunately can't tell when one navigates' back. Also there are some new keyboard shortcuts for managing workspaces.

Read more about the Future Desktop app
View the nRoute's Future Desktop 2 App here [Silverlight 4, nRoute.Framework]

More...