Let’s take a look at some of the basics of Caliburn Micro.

Let’s start with the bare minimum, skeleton app to get us started…

1. Create a WPF application is Visual Studio
2. Use NuGet to add Caliburn.Micro via the references context menu
3. Open App.xaml and remove the StartupUri=”MainWindow.xaml”
4. Delete the file MainWindow.xaml as Caliburn Micro will create the main window for our application
5. Caliburn Micro uses naming convention to allow it to load the relevant view for the view model, so the view should be prefixed with the same name as the viewmodel, i.e. create a class named ShellViewModel which will become the entry point to the application. Then create a UserControl named ShelllView
6. Open ShellViewModel and drived the class from PropertyChangedBase (ass the using clause for Caliburn.Micro).

   PropertyChangedBase gives us the implementation of INotifyPropertyChanged for the databinding. So the code should look like

   public class ShellViewModel : PropertyChangedBase
   {
   }
   

   Obviously don’t forget to add Caliburn.Micro as a using clause

7. Open the ShellView.xaml file and (just so we can easily see the user control’s usage, change the Background to a colour of your choosing. Also changed the Width and Height to a sensible starting value otherwise the application will open just as the caption bar. The user control size gives the initial size of the main window when it’s displayed
8. Now we need to create the code to actually create the main window and hook display our intial control. Create a new class, it can be named anything you like but I’ll named mine AppBootstrapper to fit in with the App.xaml name
9. Derive AppBootstrapper from Bootstrapper as per

   public class AppBootstrapper : Bootstrapper<ShellViewModel>
   {
   }
   

   Obviously don’t forget to add Caliburn.Micro as a using clause.

   As you’ll see we set the Bootstrapper up with the view model, not the view. Caliburn Micro’s naming conventions will work out the view name as ShellView and handle the composition of the views from this.

10. At this point we have all the bits for Caliburn Micro to work but we need to actually get the bootstrapper to load. The simplest way is to edit App.xaml and enter the following code between the Application.Resources

    <ResourceDictionary>
    <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
    <ResourceDictionary>
    <local:AppBootstrapper x:Key="bootstrapper" />
    </ResourceDictionary>
    </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
    </ResourceDictionary>

    Obviously added the namespace as required.

Now if you run this you should see an application window with the dimensions based upon the size of the ShellView control and if you chose a different colour background this should be displayed.