Configure Xamarin.Forms Droid to use Caliburn.Micro

Update 2017/10/15: This walk through is now available as a Visual Studio Template! More details here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=BryanBCook.XamarinFormsCaliburnMicroStarterKit

In my last post, we created a Xamarin.Forms project and added necessary components for taking advantage of my favourite MVVM framework, Caliburn.Micro. However, the solution didn't compile because we needed to make some platform specific changes. Today we'll address this.

Add an Application

The main entry point into our Android application is the Application class as defined in the AndroidManifest.xml. By default, the Xamarin.Forms template does not include an Application class, but we’ll need one in order to hold some global state.

To register our custom application, we subclass Caliburn’s CaliburnApplication class and mark it with an [Application] attribute:

namespace XF.CaliburnMicro1.Droid
{
    using System;
    using Android.App;
    using Android.Runtime;
    using Caliburn.Micro;

    [Application]
    public class Application : CaliburnApplication
    {
        public Application(IntPtr javaReference, JniHandleOwnership transfer)
              : base(javaReference, transfer)
        {
        }

        public override void OnCreate()
        {
            base.OnCreate();

            Initialize();
        }
    }
}

Create and configure IoC

One of the main features of the CaliburnApplication is to create our platform-specific Inversion of Control (IoC) container and register any platform-specific abstractions.

There are four primary methods that we need to implement in our Application (SelectAssemblies, BuildUp, GetAllInstances, GetInstance). These methods are the backing implementation for Caliburn's IoC:

It's important to note that we register the Xamarin.Forms App as a singleton before we activate it. This is largely because we want the App to have the same lifetime as our Android Application, which avoids a few scenarios where the Android application lifecycle causes the App class to be reinitialized more than once.

Our Application class now looks like this:

namespace XF.CaliburnMicro1.Droid
{
    using System;
    using System.Collections.Generic;
    using System.Reflection;
    
    using Android.App;
    using Android.Runtime;
    
    using Caliburn.Micro;
    
    using XF.CaliburnMicro1.ViewModels;

    [Application]
    public class Application : CaliburnApplication
    {
        private SimpleContainer _container;

        public Application(IntPtr javaReference, JniHandleOwnership transfer)
              : base(javaReference, transfer)
        {
        }

        public override void OnCreate()
        {
            base.OnCreate();

            Initialize();
        }

        protected override void Configure()
        {
            _container = new SimpleContainer();

            // make the container available for resolution
            _container.Instance(_container);

            // CRITICAL! make sure our Xamarin.Forms App 
            // can only be initilized once!
            _container.Singleton<App>();

            // TODO: Register any Platform-Specific abstractions here
        }

        protected override IEnumerable<Assembly> SelectAssemblies()
        {
            // Get a list of all assemblies that will be used
            // by the IoC container
            return new[]
            {
                GetType().Assembly,
                typeof (MainViewModel).Assembly
            };
        }

        protected override void BuildUp(object instance)
        {
            _container.BuildUp(instance);
        }

        protected override IEnumerable<object> GetAllInstances(Type service)
        {
            return _container.GetAllInstances(service);
        }

        protected override object GetInstance(Type service, string key)
        {
            return _container.GetInstance(service, key);
        }
    }
}

Modify MainActivity

The last modification we need to make is a slight change to our existing MainActivity. Rather than instantiating our App class, we resolve it from the IoC container.

namespace XF.CaliburnMicro1.Droid
{
    using Android.App;
    using Android.Content.PM;
    using Android.OS;
    
    using Xamarin.Forms.Platform.Android;
    
    using Caliburn.Micro;

    [Activity(
        Label = "XF.CaliburnMicro1", 
        Icon = "@drawable/icon", 
        MainLauncher = true, 
        ConfigurationChanges = ConfigChanges.ScreenSize | ConfigChanges.Orientation)]
    public class MainActivity : FormsApplicationActivity
    {
        protected override void OnCreate(Bundle bundle)
        {
            base.OnCreate(bundle);

            global::Xamarin.Forms.Forms.Init(this, bundle);

            // Resolve the App class to use the singleton we created
            LoadApplication(IoC.Get<App>());
        }
    }
}

Compile and Run

At this point, the android project should be good to go. Set the project as the default target, and run (F5). The project should automatically be configured to deploy the app to the emulator.

Next Steps

So we have our Android application running our Caliburn.Micro flavoured Xamarin.Forms app. The next step is to configure our iOS project with similar customizations.

• Configure Xamarin.Forms iOS to use Caliburn.Micro
• Configure Xamarin.Forms UWP to use Caliburn.Micro