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Using Monocross on Windows Phone 7 with Panorama and/or Pivot control

I love the Monocross idea but am a bit lost for Windows Phone 7 when I want to use a Panorama and/or Pivot control. The only view provided is the Page view. So navigating from one page to another works great! But now I want a Pivot or Panorama. Basically I could create a new controller for this view, but do get the "pages" inside the controls. The navigate does really Navigate to it, but not inside the Pivot / Panorama.

For Monotouch and MonoDroid samples have been prepared how to do this (basically a new viewcontroller was created). But WP7 has been left behind.

Anybody?

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Stefan de Vogelaere Avatar asked Feb 01 '12 07:02

Stefan de Vogelaere


1 Answers

I am also doing cross platform development using mono and like you and many others face the problem of what to do with respect to the user interface and other underlying hardware integration.

I decided that I did not want to be at the mercy of yet another third party framework (mono is enough) and researched for a solution that I could build and maintain myself. The new MVVM pattern along with Expression Blend is really cool but soon you find yourself stuck when it comes to cross platform development.The MVC an MVP patterns also did not seem to suit what I needed. Finally settled on the PM pattern and expanded it into a PMH where the H is for hardware. To achieve what I needed I had to abstract the fundamental widgets (buttons, panels, textboxes) into a underlying platform layer for each device type. My platform layer represents around 1% of my code base and allows me to skin the application for each device I target it for.

For my WP7 solution I use hardly any HTML only around 25 lines which is enough to initialise the application and the main page. The rest of the user interface is put together programmatically just like I would in WinForms. On WP7 I still make use of the Pivot control as it really is pretty groovy and am modelling a similar control for use on Android/iPhone. While it wont be 100% the same it will be very similar and still use the same navigation engine within my core code.

I am not complete with my development yet but so far I am very happy with my progress. I have been developing user interface for Windows application for some 20 years and I never use the interface builder tools as I find they never give me what I want and really waste my time (Blend is pretty cool though) and also create a tremendous code bloat especially in Blend.

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Gary Barwick Avatar answered Sep 19 '22 17:09

Gary Barwick