Trouble running the WPF Application Framework examples

Question

I feel embarrassed asking this here, but I was wondering if anyone could help me quickly, the Microsoft documentation around this is actually quite poor.

Microsoft host what appears to be a very neat framework on codeplex that helps you build MVVM WPF applications, and has samples illustrating much of the MVVM principles and the supporting code base they offer. It's called WPF Application Framework and you can download it here.

I downloaded the framework and its samples, as well as the documentation for the sample i'm interested in (WPF EmailClient), but I'm having trouble running the sample.

This is a picture of the documentation:

As you can see, it tells you to simply set the EmailClient.Presentation project as the startup project and run.

However

This project is in fact a Class Library, and cannot be set as a startup project.

I turned it into a Windows Application, but it needs an App.xaml file, and the whole project seems to use MEF as an IoC container and dependency injects all the views and ViewModels dependencies.

All this means a lot of work for me to launch this project, and I was just wondering if any of you out there know how you are supposed to do this.

Oh yea and I'm running windows 8 and VS2012, but I really don't think that has anything to do with it. (The project is targeting .Net 4 anyway)

Answer 1

Interesting framework.

The application for the overarching "InformationManager" sample is a project called "Assembler"

You'll need to set this as the startup project. Make sure you do a full build of the entire solution before you run it, otherwise you'll get an xaml parse exception in app.xaml.

Answer 2

By changing the project type you broke the solution. Download the example again and open the solution in Visual Studio. Next right click on the project you run and select Set as Startup Project.

Then when you press F5 it'll launch that application, not the class library.