Currently the Timer class is not available when targeting both Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 Store Apps.

For the app I’m building I want the MVVMLight PCL ViewModel to update a property every second – the databound View then simply updates itself.

One solution is to implement your own Task based Timer as described in this Stack Overflow article.

Another approach could be to make use of Reactive Extensions Observable.Interval method to create a sequence that updates every n-seconds.

First off add the Reactive Extensions NuGet package to your PCL project.

Next, in the ViewModel constructor (or command, etc.) create the interval stream and then tell it to execute a method every second:

var timer = Observable.Interval(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)).DistinctUntilChanged();

timer.ObserveOn(SynchronizationContext.Current).Subscribe(TimerTick);

I’m using SynchronizationContext.Current because the TimerTick method (below) updates the ViewModel property, without this there is a thread access problem.

So the TimerTick method ends up being called every second and simply updates the (MVVMLight) TotalTimeLeft property:

private void TimerTick(long l)
{
    TotalTimeLeft = DateTime.Now.Second.ToString();
}

I’m not an expert on Rx so there may be a better way of using it in this instance (or some potential hidden problems) but it’s working in the app so far (and on ARM Surface RT)…

It’s however cool to know that Rx has portable class library support.

Any Rx experts feel free to comment on a better way :)

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