Professional Windows® Phone 7 Application Development: Building Applications and Games Using Visual Studio, Silverlight®, and XNA®

Chapter 17. Frameworks

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using the Managed Extensibility Framework to make your Windows Phone application composable and extensible

• Tracking application usage using the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework

• Testing your application using the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework

• Automating the Windows Phone emulator

For small, lightweight Windows Phone applications there is no need to use any additional frameworks other than what comes out-of-the-box with Silverlight. However, as your application grows and you extend its capabilities, it will become important to have an application architecture that enables it to grow while still remaining robust.

In this chapter, you will learn about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) for componentizing your application and the Microsoft Silverlight Analytics Framework (MSAF) for tracking application usage. You will also learn how to test your application as part of your development process.

MANAGED EXTENSIBILITY FRAMEWORK

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) was introduced in the desktop version of .NET Framework v4.0 as a way to encourage developers to architect their applications into components that could be glued together at runtime. This not only promotes application componentization, but also allows applications to be extensible and more testable. Despite Windows Phone applications typically being significantly smaller in size and complexity than their desktop counterparts, they can still benefit from the use of ...