Ezequiel Jadib’s Blog

Four new samples has been added to the CompositeWPF Contrib community project:

• Presentation Model with DataTemplates. Julian Dominguez has been writing about Presentation Model and in his latest post he described how he updated the Commanding QuickStart we shipped in the CompositeWPF June 2008 release to use automatic DataTemplates.
• Disconnected Service Agent (DSA) with CompositeWPF. This sample created by Mariano Converti and Damian Schenkelman demonstrate how to use the Disconnected Service Agent (DSA) with CompositeWPF. For more information about this sample, see How-to: Use the Disconnected Service Agent (DSA) with CompositeWPF (Prism).
• DialogWorkspace sample. In this sample you will find how to use the Dialog Workspace created by Willem Meints
• CAB WPF QuickStart migrated to CompositeWPF. In my previous post, I announced the release of a new guidance to help CAB developers familiarize themselves with the Composite Application Guidance. This sample created by Ignacio Baumann Fonay, Ezequiel Sculli and Mariano Converti, shows how to migrate from CAB to CompositeWPF. (the application selected was the WPF QuickStart included in the SCSF source code). I recommend you to read also the documentation, because explains how the migration was performed. For more information see WPF Quickstart (shipped with SCSF) regenerated using Composite WPF (Prism).

Download

You can get these samples, among others extensions, by downloading latest change set of the CompositeWPF Contrib source control.

Coming soon

Some people has been asking for an OutlookBar sample. The good news is that Damian Schenkelman and me are working on it, so stay tuned, we will publish it soon.

These are the latest extensions added to the CompositeWPF Contrib community project:

• Extended Module Loader Service (contributed by Willem Meints). The extended module loader service can be used to load modules on demand. When the module loader service loads a module it will check if the module being loaded is actually installed and install it from the original installation source.
• Module Status Service (contributed by Willem Meints). The module status service can be used to retrieve a list of modules and their status (loaded or unloaded). This is particular useful when you want to show the user of your CompositeWPF application what modules are available to the application and which modules are actually active at this moment.
  For more information about this service, see Module status service for CompositeWPF.
• OutlookBar control and region adapter.
   
  For more information about this control, see Use the OutlookBar in your CompositeWPF (Prism) Applications.

Where I can find the documentation of the extensions added to the project?

To check the documentation of the extensions added so far, please visit the Documentation page in the community site.

To learn more about other additions to the project, see this post.

Enjoy!

Two years ago, together with Matias Woloski we wrote the Outlook Bar for the Composite Application Block (CAB). I can say that it was a popular workspace, with more than 19,000 downloads!. Now that we shipped CompositeWPF (Prism), some people at the CompositeWPF community started asking for the OutlookBar for CompositeWPF, so Julian Dominguez, Matias Woloski and me decided to spend some time and create the Composite WPF version.

 

Usage

First of all, you have to register the region adapter mapping in the Bootstrapper as shown in the code below:

protected override RegionAdapterMappings ConfigureRegionAdapterMappings()
{
    IEventAggregator eventAggregator = Container.Resolve<IEventAggregator>();

    RegionAdapterMappings mappings = base.ConfigureRegionAdapterMappings();

    mappings.RegisterMapping(typeof(OutlookBarControl), new OutlookBarControlRegionAdapter(eventAggregator));

    return mappings;
}

Now you can add the OutlookBarControl to your Shell/View XAML (you have to declare the namespace on the top of the file):

<Controls:OutlookBarControl 

       cal:RegionManager.RegionName="{x:Static infrastructure:RegionNames.OutlookBarRegion}"/>
                

To add views, just obtain the region and call the Add method as you do with other regions: 

IRegionManager regionManager = Container.Resolve<IRegionManager>();
MyView view = new MyView();
OutlookBarControl.SetOutlookBarMetadata(view, new OutlookBarMetadata
    {
        Title = "Mail",
        Payload = "MyPayload"
    });

regionManager.Regions[RegionNames.OutlookBarRegion].Add(view);
regionManager.Regions[RegionNames.OutlookBarRegion].Activate(view);

As you may noticed, in the preceding code we are also setting the OutlookBarMetadata attached property to the view. This attached property is used by the control template and by the OutlookBarControlRegionAdapter.

• In the control template we are using the Title property in the OutlookBarControl header and in the buttons.
• In the region adapter we are using the payload to publish the OutlookBarEvent. This event is published every time you select a view.

The OutlookBarMetadata serves a similar purpose the OutlookBarSmartPartInfo served in the CAB version.

Disclaimer

This code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Acknowledgments

The control template is based on this article on CodeProject.

Download

You can get the OutlookBar by downloading the latest change set of the CompositeWPF Contrib source control.

 

Stay tuned, we are working on v1.1 of the OutlookBar.