Coproject - a RIA Caliburn.Micro demo, part 0

At the presentation about Rapid RIA development in .NET, I promised to publish a tutorial about using WCF RIA Services and Caliburn.Micro. So here it is! In this part, we will get our computer ready for development.

You will need Visual Studio 2010 to follow this tutorial. Express edition of Visual Studio is not supported by RIA Services.
You will also need a MS SQL Server instance. Locally running Express edition is fine. On the other hand, you should be able to use any data store supported by ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.

1. Install Silverlight tools

Follow instructions here and install Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010.

Install the latest Silverlight 4 Toolkit (currently in April 2010 version).

2. Install WCF RIA Services

Use this page and follow steps 1 and 2 in the Download and Install section. You should end up with WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta and WCF RIA Services December 2010 Toolkit.

3. Get Caliburn.Micro

You should get Caliburn.Micro from its site on Codeplex. Unfortunately, there is no official release of C.M, so we’ll have to get the source code and build it ourselves. This is not a big deal so go the Source Code page and download the latest version (link to the right of the page).

Note: Since C.M is still evolving (and getting better), I recommend to clone C.M repository locally and update it regularly. You will need a Mercurial client but following instructions is very straightforward.

Open C.M solution located in /src/Caliburn.Micro.sln. Because C.M contains three projects that share the same source codes (Silverlight, WPF, WP7), you might get a message that “One or more projects in the solution were not loaded correctly” if any support for of these is missing. Ignore it – as long as Caliburn.Micro.Silverlight is opened, you are fine.

Note: you can find all documentation about C.M on its Codeplex site.

Build the Silverlight project.

4. Create Coproject solution

Open Visual Studio and create a new Silverlight Application project and call it Coproject. On the next dialog, let VS create a Web project to host the application and don’t forget to Enable WCF RIA Services as shown below.

Now, you should see a solution with two projects:

That is all for now. We are ready for part 1.