MVVM light toolkit | Michel Salib's Blog

As you may know, I am currently developing a Github client for windows phone 7, named Gi7. It is not complete yet even if it is functional. During that development, a friend of mine asked me for a Google Reader client.

As long as I am also using Google Reader and there is not really nice free app that is better than the mobile website, I decided to take au pause in the development of Gi7 to start a new app named Readr7. Hopefully the app is smaller and I shall continue the development of Gi7 soon.

What it does

Stream

The Readr7 app just does what a light Google Reader client should do.
- You can login and logout from your Google account.
- Then you have all your unread items with abstracts. They are automatically marked as read when scrolling the feed.
- You can of course access a configuration panel to selected folder and choose to see also marked as read items.
- Just tap on an item to open IE or make a long tap to manually mark as read/unread.
- Last but not least, if you pin the app to your home, the tile will be updated every 30 minutes with your unread items count.

About the development

As usual, I published the code to Github here. It shares some stuffs and concepts with the Gi7 app. You can of course get the code and contribute to the repo.

The code is almost finished. I just need to review some design (get a logo for instance), and bugs. About the last point, it is very important for me to get some external feedback, especially from developers who may run into error I did not though about and thus help be debug some issues.

About Google Reader, the bad thing is that it doesn’t have any official API. You can find some doc, but things may change without any advance notice. Whatever, the best doc I found is here: http://code.google.com/p/pyrfeed/wiki/GoogleReaderAPI.

As usual, I used my favorite tools:
- RestSharp for fast access to the Google Reader API with easy json deserialization
- MVVM light toolkit for easy use of the MVVM pattern
- Silverlight Toolkit for Windows Phone that I recompiled for mango

Last but not least, I add a post build instruction to copy the xap file to the root of the solution so that you can directly download the last app version on github.

: Config

: Login

: Mark as read

: Stream

: Tile

As you may know, I am not only a Symfony2 developer. I also enjoy a lot coding C#, especially Silverlight on the Windows Phone platform. Most of the time, I try to keep working on both technologies because they bring me complementary knowledge about good practices and design patterns. Also it prevents me from getting bored too fast on a project.
I am currently finishing my internship where I have a Silverlight 4 project using RIA Services, Prism and other cool stuffs. Thus I am looking into a new Silverlight project which is a Windows Phone 7 application called Gi7.

Gi7, the project

Gi7 is a github client for windows phone 7 that is also hosted on github.
As a matter of fact, I hope to get some help, feedback about some part of the code. I tried to make of the best practices I know, but I know things are still not perfect. Also I am not a so good UI designer, and I could use some help on the subject.
What it does
Github 7 intends to be a complete mobile application view of github. You should consult everything you need, but also post comments, accept pull request, follow users, edit a repo or a file…
It should also have a non logged part (which is not the case right know) to browse the gits and users.
For the moment you can do some nice things:
- Login/logout
- Read your news feed, get your stats, followers, followings, owned and watched repos

Homepage - newsfeed

Homepage - profile

- Consult another’s user profile, with stats, followers, followings and repos

User - details

User - repos

User - users

- Consult a repo with stats, commits, pull requests and issues

Repo - details

Repo - commits

Repo - pull requests

- Read a commit (in heavy dev)

The development

Actually I started the development last week on my free time, and it is going at a fast pace. I intend to have an almost full featured application around the end of august.
The application is built for the 7.1 version of windows phone 7 (aka. Mango) so that it already supports all the features of the new sdk. I make use of the MVVM light Toolkit and the RestSharp library.
Technically, I heavily make use of the MVVM design pattern with some Dependency Injection. I intend to make Gi7 a cutting-edge project while keeping things lightweight.
The Gi7 app has already nice development features, such as:
- auto caching of images.
- a Github client that automatically cache every requests and provide a very easy way to de-serialize the json api responses. Also the clients interface is very easy to bind to a view model.

Get involved, get the app

Again, I am looking for contributors and feedback about the application. Feel free to fork me, report issues, submit pull requests or ask for new functionalities: https://github.com/michelsalib/Gi7.
I intend to submit the app to the marketplace when the mango is officially released.