StartupUri and you.

Let me start with introducing myself. My name is Joakim Rosendahl and I’ve been at Connecta since April first 2009. Became a member of Connecta’s Surface team a month later. I have an academic background in Computer Science and I’ve mostly been working with WinForms and WPF since 2007.

Enough about me, because I’m going to talk about something that happened to me in my latest Surface project. I had the ambition to implement a surface project using the M-V-VM design pattern. I took the naive approach and removed the StartupUri statement in App.xaml and added code below in the code-behind.

protected override void OnStartup(StartupEventArgs e)
{
 base.OnStartup(e);

 var demoViewModel = new DemoViewModel();
 var demoView = new DemoView
                    {
                        DataContext = demoViewModel
                    };

 MainWindow = demoView;
 MainWindow.Show();
}

The idea is to hook up the view model (DemoViewModel) before showing the main view (DemoView.xaml) which is a SurfaceWindow. This worked fine until I hooked up to the Surface Shell on our surface board. Somehow, when I start the application in the Surface Shell the Shell is on top of my application. When I alt-tab I can see my application running in the background. For some reason my main view doesn’t get incorporated into the Shell as it should do.

Anyway, I made a workaround, restored the StartupUri property to “DemoView.xaml” and added some non-M-V-MV code. I’ve posted this problem on the Surface Community for a couple of weeks ago. The Surface support has contacted me on email to this matter. But a simple solution would to not make the main SurfaceWindow to a View (as according to the M-V-VM design pattern) but instead to something like the sample code that Dan Cravier posted on his blog ages ago. I will still update when I get a proper solution from the Surface Support.