'Hello, World!' Sample

‘Hello, World!’ Walkthrough

Create a new C# project

• Start Visual Studio.

• Create a new project (File | New Project…). In the ‘New Project’ dialog, navigate to ‘Windows Athens Apps’ as shown below (in the left pane in the dialog: Templates | Visual C# | Store Apps | Windows Athens Apps).
  Select the template ‘Blank Athens Application (UAP)’
  Remember to give a good name to your first app! In this example, we called the project ‘HelloWorld’.

  

  If this is the first project you create on this machine, Visual Studio will prompt you to renew the Store Developer License.

Add content to MainPage.xaml

• Let’s add some content to the MainPage. From Solution Explorer, select the ‘MainPage.xaml’ file. We want to add a TextBox and a Button, to show some interaction. So we will edit the XAML file to add these elements. Locate the ‘' tag in the XAML section of the designer, and add the following markup:

<Grid Background="{ThemeResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}">
    <StackPanel HorizontalAlignment="Center" VerticalAlignment="Center">
        <TextBox x:Name="HelloMessage" Text="Hello, World!" Margin="10" IsReadOnly="True"/>
        <Button x:Name="ClickMe" Content="Click Me!"  Margin="10" HorizontalAlignment="Center"/>
    </StackPanel>
</Grid>

• Now that we have a TextBox and a Button, let’s add some code which will be executed when the Button is pressed. Double click on the Button in the design surface: Visual Studio will add a Click property to the Button XAML tag and generate the ClickMe_Click method in ‘MainPage.xaml.cs’. Let’s add a simple line of code in the method:

<Button x:Name="ClickMe" Content="Click Me!"  Margin="10" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Click="ClickMe_Click"/>

private void ClickMe_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
    this.HelloMessage.Text = "Hello, Athens!";
}

Build and test the app locally

• Make sure the app builds correctly invoking the Build | Build Solution menu command.

• Since this is a Universal Application Platform (aka UAP) App, you can test this on your Visual Studio machine as well: Just press F5, and the app will run inside your machine. You should see something like this:

  

  Close the app after you’re done validating it.

Deploy the app to your Athens device

• Of course, we want to deploy our first app to our Athens device. It’s easy. From the monitor connected to the MBM board or from the Athens Watcher utility, you can see the unique name of your Athens device (or the IP address). We’ll use that name in the ‘Remote Machine Debugging’ settings in VS.

  In the Visual Studio toolbar, click on the ‘Local Machine’ dropdown and select ‘Remote Machine’:

  

  At this point, Visual Studio will present the ‘Remote Connections’ dialog. Put the name of your Athens device (in this example, we’re using ‘my-athens-pc’) and select ‘None’ for Windows Authentication. Then click ‘Select’.

  

  Couple of notes: First, you can use the IP address instead of the Athens device name. Second, you can verify and/or modify these values navigating to the project properties (select ‘Properties’ in the Solution Explorer) and choose the ‘Debug’ tab on the left:

  

• Now we’re ready to deploy to the remote Athens device. Simply press F5 (or select Debug | Start Debugging) to start debugging our app. You should see the app come up in Athens device screen, and you should be able to click on the button.

• You can set breakpoints, see variable values, etc. To stop the app, press on the ‘Stop Debugging’ button (or select Debug | Stop Debugging).

• Congratulations! You just deployed your first UAP application to a device running Windows Athens!

Set HelloWorld as the Startup App

• You can also set this HelloWorld app to be the ‘Startup App’ for your Athens device, so that when the device reboot, it will start HelloWorld automatically. To do so, you’ll need to run a command line utility called iotstartup on the Athens device. We will do this using ‘telnet’.

• First, start a telnet connection leveraging the Athens Watcher utility from the Visual Studio machine. Select your Athens device, right click on it, and select ‘Telnet Here’. (You can also start telnet from the command line and use the Athens device name or IP address). Log in into the machine using the DefaultAccount username (no password).

• From the telnet session, type:

    iotstartup list HelloWorld
  

  and you should see the full name of our HelloWorld UAP application, i.e. something like:

    Headed   : HelloWorld_n2pe7ts0w7wey!App
  

  the utility is confirming that HelloWorld is an ‘headed’ application, and is installed correctly.

• Now, it’s easy to set this app as the ‘Startup App’. Just type the command:

    iotstartup add headed HelloWorld
  

  The utility will confirm that the new Startup headed app is now HelloWorld:

    AppId changed to HelloWorld_n2pe7ts0w7wey!App
  

• Go ahead and restart your Athens device. From telnet, you can issue the shutdown command:

    shutdown -r -t 5
  

• Once the device has restarted, you’ll see HelloWorld start automatically.

Questions/Suggestions

As always, for questions and feedback, contact us.