Wednesday, May 23, 2012

What do you want from Tombstone Helper?

A little over a year ago I created http://tombstonehelper.codeplex.com/. It was a response to the large number of apps which didn't implement support for saving state during tombstoning and the fact the framework provides little to help.
My aim was to create something that was so simple to use that there would be no excuse, at least in a simple app, for not adding tombstone persistence support. My thought was that if you're up to developing a more complex app you would be capable of adding appropriate persistence support and so not need my help.

The library has been noted amongst the more popular third party libraries in general use and at one point was estimated to be in 3% of all apps in the marketplace. I also know, based on some of the apps it's in, that it's been included in apps on at least several hundred thousand devices.

It's currently at version 2.5.
I've started a version 3.0 several times with a view to adding viewmodel support but each time have failed to find a way I consider suitable for a broad enough number of use cases and which doesn't require too much effort from the person using the library.

As you may have guessed from the tone of this post so far, I'm going to try again but I'm interested to know if there is anyone out there using it who would like extra features, functionality or has a strong opinion on how viewmodel persistence should be handled.

I want to help those who were building simple apps a year ago as they move on to more complex scenarios.

If you have any thoughts, comments or opinions please: leave them in the comments below; email me; or tweet your suggestion.

Thanks

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:29 am

    Please have a look at http://obelisk.codeplex.com/ I think it is better and easier to use and can persist full view models.

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  2. Obelisk looks very like the way that Caliburn.Micro does it. Way more overhead than I'm after achieveing though.

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  3. I've been hunting this weekend for a good way to tombstone view models. I'm using MVVMLight with Funq Ioc to inject the ViewModel. I'd be very interested in what you come up with.

    At this point I'm stuck trying to determine if the view should tombstone or if it should call a view model method to do it.

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