Happy 1st Birthday to MvvmCross - How hard can it be...?

It's official: MvvmCross is 1 year old this week!

The MvvmCross story started early in November 2011 when I started work on the Star Wars Kinect social app.

I had a plan to technically build that app using WindowsPhone, MonoTouch and Mono for Android, and I had a basic WindowsPhone prototype that I'd hacked together using TweetSharp and some code-behind... but, beyond that, I really didn't know what I was building or how I was going to do it.

Luckily, towards the middle of the month, MonoCross 1.0 was released. I downloaded it eagerly, and also struck up some online conversations with some of the MX guys, especially Kenny Goers who patiently and skillfully dealt with all of my queries.

Over the next week or two I talked, walked and typed through lots of code. There were lots of prototypes written, lots of emails and code exchanges back and forth, and lots and lots of time spent swearing at compilers, debuggers and phones.

I *loved* what the MonoCross guys had done in trying to put down a rigid MVC structure for their apps - in trying to provide a formal structure for sharing code cross-platform. However, I also hit a few problems with the MVC pattern itself, with the way MonoCross memory management was architected and with the static nature of the MX code base.

To try to work around these problems somewhere around the 25th November, I checked in my first Cirrious.MonoCrossExtensions commit - and Kenny and I again exchanged some emails - especially about memory management, about IoC and about charging forwards...

It was also at about this point that we had a technical meeting inside the Star Wars Kinect project... and at some point during that meeting one of myself or John McLoughlin (imaji on Twitter) said something like:

We could just go the whole way with Mvvm. How hard can it be?

That question hung there for a while....

How hard can it be....?

And so... on the 28th November I ended up abandoning Cirrious.MonoCrossExtensions and commiting the first files into Cirrious.MvvmCross

This was the first proper MvvmCross commit - 'OMG! What haz I done?' - just 280 changed files and 60,000 additions...

The rest, as they say, is history :)

Happy Birthday Mvx!