Building your first Windows Phone 8 application following the MVVM pattern

Windows Phone applications are generally created using either HTML5 or Silverlight. Most of the people still use the Silverlight approach as it has a full flavor of backend languages such as C# and also the JavaScript library is still in its infancy. With Silverlight or XAML, the architecture that always comes into the developer's mind is MVVM. Like all XAML-based development, Windows 8 Silverlight apps also inherently support MVVM models and hence, people tend to adopt it more often when developing Windows Phone apps. In this recipe, we are going to take a quick look at how you can use the MVVM pattern to implement an application.

Getting ready

Before starting to develop an application, you first need to set up your machine with the appropriate SDK, which lets you develop a Windows Phone application and also gives you an emulator to debug the application without a device. The SDK for Windows Phone 8 apps can...