Beginning Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Windows® Phone Applications Using Silverlight® and XNA®

14

Patterns, Frameworks, and Tests

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Understanding patterns
• Using the MVVM pattern in Windows Phone 7 applications
• Using third-party frameworks
• Performing unit tests
• Writing unit tests for Windows Phone 7 applications

Throughout this book, you have learned many techniques that enable you to create Windows Phone 7 applications. However, having basic, low-level tools to do this will only take you so far. For larger-scale applications, particularly enterprise applications that may need to be developed by a team of programmers, more advanced, high-level techniques are essential for success.

In this chapter, you'll look at some of these techniques, in particular the implementation of patterns, frameworks, and tests. Each of these individually will make your applications more robust and more maintainable. As you will see, they also support each other in elegant ways, and the combination is far more than the sum of the parts. If you want to be the best programmer you can be and if you want to work on the best teams in the industry, the techniques in this chapter are must-haves.

Patterns, frameworks, and tests apply to a much wider range of development than Windows Phone 7 applications. In this chapter, you'll not only learn the basics but also see how to apply these techniques to Silverlight applications on Windows Phone 7 devices. You'll also focus on techniques that work well with this type of application rather than look at all the options and compare ...