While developing a Silverlight WP7 app, it’s often handy to display demo content in design view so you have an idea of how real content will look. This is one of the biggest advantages of the MVVM architecture – separate data for design and runtime, as demonstrated below:
Fortunately Alex Pendleton has created a Lorem Ipsum generator in .NET 2.0 called NLipsum. Unfortunately it doesn’t work directly on WP7 without a little massaging. Fear not, for I have done the work for you! You can download the project files here, or the binary here.
The dll contains some raw XML files for generating the lipsums, and these are loaded at runtime. For this reason it’s best not to have the binary included with release builds of your app, lest you get a slower startup and increased memory usage. I’ve put in some caching that should mean you can call the generator as much as you like without worrying too much about performance. To use the generator, include it into your project and import the namespace:
using NLipsum.Core;
Then, it’s a simple case of calling the generator to do your bidding:
return LipsumGenerator.Generate(1, Features.Paragraphs, null, Lipsums.LoremIpsum); return LipsumGenerator.Generate(1, Features.Sentences, null, Lipsums.TheRaven); return LipsumGenerator.Generate(2, Features.Words, null, Lipsums.LeMasque);
If the content doesn’t show in design view, try re-building your app. This will refresh your design-time databinding as well as bringing in any changes you’ve made to the model (such as adding the lorem ipsum).