Introducing Chrysalis

In this post I am going to introduce the new Chrysalis framework available now from CodePlex at http://chrysalis.codeplex.com. Chrysalis is in an open source framework designed to simplify the development of Silverlight based Windows Phone 7 applications. Whilst it is primarily focused on Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) related presentation patterns, it can be applied to other designs.

Many times it has been commented that if you are a Silverlight developer (and to some extent a WPF developer), then you now have the skills to write Windows Phone 7 applications. And this is almost true – with the introduction of Windows Phone 7 you can now write Silverlight applications that run on the phone as native apps (with XNA the other option for more graphically rich apps). But at the same time there are a number of new concepts that you will need to consider to write high quality software that runs within the constraints of a mobile device.

Tombstoning

The first consideration that everyone who works with Windows Phone 7 (both in Silverlight and XNA) should be aware of is the interestingly named “tombstoning”. The MSDN documentation has an excellent section on the “Execution Model Overview for Windows Phone” so I will not go into this in detail. In summary, you have to be aware that your application may be exited automatically at any point during its execution (for example when a phone call comes in) – not pushed to the background, but killed outright. At some later point you application may be reactivated, and it is you job as a developer to ensure that all application state is restored. The end user should believe that the app was sat there in the background all the time, even though you know that it was killed and restarted.

The Windows Phone 7 framework will warn you that you application is being deactivated with the PhoneApplicationService.Deactivated event. This is your opportunity to save any state required, either to one of a couple of state bags, or to isolated storage. When the application is restarted then you will receive the PhoneApplicationService.Activated event, and you can restore the UI to its former state.

In reality there is a lot to think about. Firstly you have to ensure that if you are using MVVM then your ViewModels receive the activation and deactivation events. This is complicated by the fact that the PhoneApplicationService.Activated event is often fired before your ViewModel is even created. In addition there is a lot of control state that may need to be maintained – currently focused control, position of scroll bars, etc.

Chrysalis aims to greatly simplify this process.

Choosers

In Windows Phone 7 there are a number of points at which you may need to interact with the built in phone UI, for example to take a photo with the camera, or to retrieve contact information. This is done using “Choosers” (MSDN article).

When you show a chooser we once again experience tombstoning. For the duration of the user interacting with the phone UI, our application is exited, to be restarted later when the interaction has completed. Not only do we now need to restore any state within the application, we must remember that we were calling into a chooser and what we were intending to do with the result – for example if we have multiple sets of contact information on the screen, which were we updating?

Chrysalis aims to allow you to specify a callback within your ViewModel that will receive the result from the chooser. Combined with the tombstoning support, your application should be barely aware that the application was killed and restarted. Instead the chooser will look like any other method call and callback.

Access to Hardware

Although the programming model for Windows Phone 7 is entirely managed code, there are two “flavours” of application – Silverlight and XNA. In several cases features exist within XNA, but not within Silverlight. Whilst these can be accessed by simply adding the XNA assembly references, the APIs sometimes require a different mindset.

Chrysalis aims to provide wrappers where required to make connecting to the hardware available through the XNA framework as simple as using any of the native Silverlight controls.

Summary

To conclude, the Chrysalis framework is now available at http://chrysalis.codeplex.com. While this is only a first release I encourage you to take a look at the basis provided and keep an eye on this blog as I will describe the usage and implementation of new features as they are introduced.

And please provide feedback on existing or new features, either through this blog, or on CodePlex.