As some of you may know I have been somewhat of a fan boy of WPF. All of a sudden there is this new kid on the block, WinRT and Windows store applications. So far. I have not ventured into this world, as I think it is early days with WinRT, and I expect it to change a lot. I did however quite like some of the look and feel elements of it, and thought what the heck it can’t hurt to take it for a quick spin. I also just co-authored an article with a fine yanky chap (hey Ian) who contacted me to review his WinRT MVVM framework, called : StyleMVVM which I promised Ian I would look at, and also take for a spin.
Thing is I did not want to start a big WinRT application (I like to write full apps as you tend to learn a lot more that way), without at least trying out WinRT on something smaller. I still fully intend on doing a larger StyleMVVM app, in fact the material presented in the associated article will form part of the larger StyleMVVM demo application that I promised Ian.
The code attached to this demo is pretty simple, but actually is was enough for a WPF guy to try and find out the WinRT way of doing things, and I have to say there certainly were a few weird things that were quite unexpected coming from WPF land. I will talk about these in the body of the article, but we digress, what does the demo app do?
Like I say I wanted to keep things very simple, so I have written a very simple grid based schedule control, that is readonly you can not add items to it by clicking, its all setup via existing code. Ok that data could suck stuff from a database, but there is no way to dynamically add appointments to the schedule using touch, or the mouse at runtime, though that may feature in the fuller StyleMVVM app.
So in summary, the associated article demo code is a simple schedule control that works with touch or the mouse.
You can download the code and get a full blow by blow account of it right here :
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/654374/WinRT-Simple-ScheduleControl
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