For a very (too) long time, the installation procedure for MVVM Light sucked. It involved downloading and unzipping files in various locations. Unfortunately, creating an automated installer is not completely trivial because of the variety of files that are getting installed: Binaries, Code Snippets, Project and Item Templates, all require different locations, and all that for VS2008, VS2010, Blend 4 and Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, WPF3.5 SP1, WPF4, WP7.0 and now WP7.1 “Mango”.
Thankfully, MVVM Light is taking advantage of a great community. First, Leon Zandman initiated the project of an MSI for MVVM Light. Unfortunately, Leon was not able to complete this initiative, but the very helpful and capable Morten Nielsen created the installer in Wix. This gave me the occasion to learn Wix (I had only created setups with the Visual Studio setup project so far), and to tweak the installer. I am really grateful to Morten for his time!
Yesterday, I published the automated installer for MVVM Light V3. This installer contains binaries, project and item template as well as code snippets for Silverlight 3, Silverlight 4, WPF3.5SP1, WPF4, Windows Phone 7.0 and Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango”. It allows you to develop in Visual Studio 2008, Visual Studio 2010, Expression Blend 4 and/or Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone.
Update: The previous version has issues on non-English systems. This issue has been corrected now (as of 1st of September 2011).
And then?
A lot of people asked me when MVVM Light V4 will be published. As I mentioned above, I will release a beta 1 very soon. Beta 1 means that the API should be reasonably stable. I do however have more things I want to fix, so I am also planning a beta 2 before I hit RTM. The goal with beta 2 is to let people test my fixes, just to make sure that I didn’t break anything (yes I do run quite a few unit tests in all available frameworks, but… errare humanum est!).
It is really hard for me to give a precise timeline for those releases, because of work, a new house that we are moving to in August, my wonderful family who also requires some of my time here and there and my greedy Kindle 3 (just finished A Dance with Dragons, that one was pretty amazing). However roughly put, it looks like this:
- MVVM Light V4 beta 1 before end of August.
- MVVM Light V4 beta 2 not too long after that.
- MVVM Light V4 RTM not too long after that
More than ever, I am amazed and delighted at the great feedback I receive from the MVVM Light community. This is not a perfect product, but your continuous constructive feedback keeps me motivated to continue developing and making this toolkit better. Thanks for your fantastic support!
Happy coding!
Laurent
Print | posted on Sunday, August 07, 2011 1:50 AM