Building a First Project

Abstract

So far we’ve taken a look at installing the newest version of Visual Studio, a very exciting new release of what I believe is one of the best integrated development environments out there. We’ve also gotten a first taste at how it feels to develop and run a Windows Store app, so now it’s time to take that feeling to the next level. This chapter will show how to build a complete, good-looking application. We’ll add pages to the project and learn how to navigate to those pages and how to pass data between them. We’ll also have a look at Model View ViewModel (MVVM), think Model View Controller but for XAML, including a great toolkit that provides an implementation of the MVVM design pattern. And to finish off we’ll learn that an important piece of XAML that is very commonly used in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Silverlight, and Windows Phone is missing in Windows RT. But no worries, we’ll figure something out.