Making MvvmCross with Xamarin Forms Friction Free

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My last two posts (part 1 and part 2) outlined all the steps necessary to get a new Xamarin Forms with MvvmCross project setup. What I thought was going to be a simple post ended up being much longer due to all the unnecessary steps to setup both Xamarin Forms and MvvmCross. I’ve recently been contributing a little to MvvmCross and one of my concerns with it is that there are just way to many things that you need to get right in order to get it to work nicely with Xamarin Forms. If you don’t follow one of the introductory posts, such as the one provided by Martjin van Dijk, you’ll probably start hacking around with the numerous extension points in order to get it to work. I spent time over the last day seeing if I could reduce this initial friction to getting started.

When you adopt a framework, or any library for that matter, you do so to reduce the need to reinvent the wheel – there’s no point in recreating, or creating something new, if there are existing solutions available. However, I’m of the opinion that you should be able to determine how much the framework influences the way that your code is structured. You should only have to modify your code if the framework offers a clear advantage. If we do a quick review of some of the changes required to take advantage of MvvmCross in our Xamarin Forms project you’ll see that quite a few of these are artificial requirements, mandated by the current MvvmCross implementation, rather than for any specific need. Here are just a couple:

  • App needs to inherit from MvxFormsApplication – this doesn’t add anything other than a couple of events, so unless you want to use those events, this is unnecessary
  • All pages need to inherit from the Mvx equivalent (eg MvxContentPage instead of ContentPage) – the Mvx equivalent expose a ViewModel property which can be useful but is not required in order to take advantages of data binding to the corresponding ViewModel since all Forms elements have a BindingContext that’s used for this purpose. The actual requirement here is for views/pages to implement IMvxView but unless you need the ViewModel property this shouldn’t be a requirement.
  • You need to create a class that inherits from MvxApplication which can do things like register services but most importantly defines what the starting ViewModel is going to be. This is kind of unnecessary if the only thing that it’s doing is defining the starting ViewModel, although I do understand the desire to have the starting ViewModel defined somewhere that is independent of the head projects.
  • All ViewModels need to inherit from MvxViewModel or implement IMvxViewModel – again this is somewhat unnecessary since ViewModels should just be a regular class. Now I do agree that in most cases your ViewModel is likely to implement INotifyPropertyChanged, so this additional requirements isn’t a massive addition but needless to say it shouldn’t be a requirement.

Ok, so after a bit of experimenting without modifying MvvmCross or MvvmCross.Forms (ie I’m just using the NuGet packages) what I came up with is BuildIt.MvvmCross.Forms (currently in prerelease!) which is a NuGet package which adds a couple of helper classes to get you going just that bit quicker. Here are the steps to get started using BuildIt.MvvmCross.Forms:

Start by following the steps outlined in part 1 – this will give you a Xamarin Forms project that’s completely up to date. I’ll call this project LowFriction

Next, follow the early steps in part 2 to add an additional project for your ViewModels, LowFriction.Core, and subsequently add references to MvvmCross (to all projects) and MvvmCross.Forms (to all projects except the Core project).

Add a reference to the BuildIt.MvvmCross.Forms NuGet package to all projects except the Core project. A primary requirement here is that the Core project should not have a reference to the view technology, which in this case is Xamarin Forms – if you find yourself adding a reference (directly or otherwise) to Xamarin Forms to your Core project, you’ve done something wrong and you should rethink the decisions that led you to that point.

You still need to change App.xaml to inherit from MvxFormsApplication – I couldn’t find a work around this requirements

Your pages do not need to change to implement iMvxView – MainPage inherits from ContentPage

In your Core project you will need to create ViewModels that map to your pages, and they need to implement iMvxViewModel – again I couldn’t find a work around for this requirement. MainViewModel inherits from MvxViewModel.

In your Core project you do not  need to create a class that inherits from MvxApplication – we’ll come to this later but essentially BuildIt.MvvmCross.Forms has class called TypedMvxApplication whose type parameter is the starting ViewModel. If you do want to extend the MvxApplication you can still create your own application but I would recommend using TypedMvxApplication as a starting point

UWP

In App.xaml.cs replace

Xamarin.Forms.Forms.Init(e);

with

var setup = new SetupFromViewModel<MainViewModel, LowFriction.App>(rootFrame, e);
setup.Initialize();

You can see here that the SetupFromViewModel class accepts the starting ViewModel as a parameter. If you’d prefer to define the starting ViewModel in the Core project I recommend defining a class that inherits from TypedMvxApplication, specify the starting ViewModel as the type parameter, and then use the SetupFromApplication class in App.xaml.cs.

Change MainPage to inherit from BuildIt.MvvmCross.Forms.UWP.MvxFormsWindowsPage (I also updated the layout of MainPage to show some data coming from databinding from the ViewModel, similar to what I did in my previous post)

Change the MainPage constructor to

public MainPage()
{
     this.InitializeComponent();


    MvxLoadApplication();
}

Android

Change MainActivity to inherit from CustomMvxFormsAppCompatActivity<SetupFromViewModel<MainViewModel, LowFrictionApp>, MainViewModel>

Comment out the Xamarin Forms init code:

//global::Xamarin.Forms.Forms.Init(this, bundle);
//LoadApplication(new App());

iOS

Change AppDelegate to inherit from CustomMvxFormsApplicationDelegate

Change FinishedLaunching

public override bool FinishedLaunching(UIApplication app, NSDictionary options)
{
     Window = new UIWindow(UIScreen.MainScreen.Bounds);


    var setup = new SetupFromViewModel<MainViewModel, App>(this, Window);
     setup.Initialize();


    MvxLoadApplication();


    Window.MakeKeyAndVisible();


    //global::Xamarin.Forms.Forms.Init();
     //LoadApplication(new App());


    return base.FinishedLaunching(app, options);
}

And we’re done! Build and run on each platform and you should be good to go.

As you can see there are significantly fewer steps involved in getting started, and few additional classes to be created. I do note that there is still room for improvement and I feel that as frameworks go MvvmCross has been developed with extensibility in mind – which is why I was able to streamline the getting started experience so much.

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