Today's Mobile Monday is a toolkit by Pedro Lamas that will help speed up your Windows Phone 7.x and 8 app development.

Yeah, I know it feels like I've been doing allot frameworks recently, but in my weird world, playing with new frameworks and seeing how they work is "fun". Why? They let you focus on building your apps, and not worrying about the goo. Or they let you see how the library author dealt with the goo. Or you LIKE goo and want to create your own goo buster. So many opportunities for fun.

Anyway...

Cimbalino Windows Phone Toolkit is a set of useful and powerful items that will help you build your Silverlight applications for Windows Phone. The Toolkit is divided in projects, regarding different Windows Phone application required capabilities: Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit - the base project of the toolkit, containing base MVVM services, some very useful converters, helper classes and extension methods, and the bindable Application Bar behavior

- the base project of the toolkit, containing base MVVM services, some very useful converters, helper classes and extension methods, and the bindable Application Bar behavior Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.Camera - MVVM compatible services for camera access

- MVVM compatible services for camera access Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.Controls - Controls library (requires Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit)

- Controls library (requires Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit) Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.DeviceInfo - MVVM compatible services for device information access

- MVVM compatible services for device information access Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.Location - MVVM compatible services for location access

- MVVM compatible services for location access Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.PhoneDialer - MVVM compatible services for phone dialer access

- MVVM compatible services for phone dialer access Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit.UserInfo - MVVM compatible services for user information access Note: this toolkit is only compatible with the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.x and Windows Phone 8.0! Nuget The packages are available thru NuGet here, with the same handles as the project names (e.g., the main package is "Cimbalino.Phone.Toolkit") Download Please visit the download section on GitHub to download the latest release of the toolkit.

I thought one of the cool things was that it supports both Windows Phone 7.1 and 8...

While you can easily grab the binaries from NuGut, since source is part of the fun, I grabbed the latest drop. Which compiled with no problems or errors.

How do you use it? There's a couple samples in the repository... Here's the Location sample.

So okay, what else is there of interest? Just check out snaps of the main library;

That enough to wet your appetite?

Cimbalino, you ask? Here's Pedro's answer.