The structure of the project

If you have written UWP apps before, you will see that the structure of this app is quite different. This is mostly because of the code SharpDX needs to start up. After all, a Holographic app needs a different kind of user interface than a normal screen-based app. There is no notion of a screen, no place to put controls, labels, or textboxes, and no real canvas. Everything we do needs to be done in a 3D world. An exception to this is when we create 2D apps that we want to deploy to the 3D environment. Examples of this are the Edge Browser and the now familiar Settings app. Those are standard UWP apps running on HoloLens. We will see how to build this later on.

The project should look like this:

As you can see, we have the normal Properties and References parts. Next, we have the expected Program.cs and Assets folder. That folder contains our logos, start screen, and other assets we usually see with UWP apps. Program.cs is the starting point of the app. We also can identify the HelloHoloWorld_TemporaryKey.pfx. The app needs to be signed in order to run on the device, and this is the key that does this. You cannot use this key to deploy to the store, but since we have set our device in developer mode, it will accept our app with a test key such as this one. Package.appxmanifest we have already looked at.

The other files and folder might not be that familiar.

The Common folder contains a set of helper classes that help us use SharpDX. It has some camera helpers that act as viewport to the 3D world, timers that help us with the animation of the spinning cube, and so on.

The Content folder has the code needed to draw our spinning cube. This has the shaders and renderers that SharpDX needs to draw the cube we see when we start the app. We will have a closer look at how this works in later chapters.