Windows Phone 7, MVVM and TDD (Part 1 – Introduction)

by Peter Daukintis

Before jumping into Windows Phone 7 development I need to define some ideas about a baseline architecture so I have a clear development direction to move in. This series of posts will document my thinking in this area. This is not an introductory post on any of the individual technologies and I will assume the reader has some knowledge of the basics. Here’s a list of pre-requisites:

Windows Phone developer tools CTP – April Refresh http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=cabcd5ed-7dfc-4731-9d7e-3220603cad14 (I am using VS2010 Ultimate with the SDK + Tools)
MVVM Light Toolkit http://blog.galasoft.ch/archive/2010/04/03/mvvm-light-toolkit-v3-sp1-for-windows-phone-7.aspx
Silverlight Unit Testing Framework – http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/silverlightut

I intend to develop a very simple phone application using Silverlight to demonstrate and explore the architecture. The application will present a login screen and allow a user to log in. It will present some kind of busy indicator and when logged in will navigate to another screen (well, I said it would be simple :-)).

I will develop in a test-driven manner using a model-view-viewmodel architecture to support this. I will try to document where I have made choices along the way since I expect there will be many alternative solutions.

Just so we’re all on the same page here’s a sneak preview of the end result.

Here’s a screen grab of the WP7 emulator showing the WP7Login Application and also WP7Login.Tests application. For further information about the tools and the phone emulator see http://developer.windowsphone.com/windows-phone-7-series/