During the latest months at Southworks, we have been working on several demos and materials for the Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference 2008.

And in the last two weeks, with Matias and Edgardo, we were in Redmond (Microsoft Corp Main Campus) working hard with the Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelism (DPE) Team on many different projects, all them related to PDC 2008.

Now is time to fly to LA. Matias, Edgardo, Tim, Alex, Johnny, Fede, and myself will be attending one of the biggest events designed for leading-edge developers and software architects.

There are a lot of sessions about many different topics, but the star will be the cloud. Microsoft will be announcing new technologies around the development platform, including the Windows Live Services Platform.

So if you are attending, let’s meet there. For sure that you will find me in the Cloud and Identity sessions.

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

• Window Region Adapter (contributed by Ignacio Baumann Fonay). The Window Region Adapter provides a way to show views in separate windows with a custom style.
  
  For more information about this adapter, see WindowRegionAdapter for CompositeWPF (Prism).
• Composite Extensions for Windows Forms (contributed by Brian Noyes). This extensions allows you to use module loading and events in Windows Form.
  For more information about this extensions, see Composite Extensions for Windows Forms.
• Castle Windsor adapter (contributed by Hadi Eskandari). This adapter allows you to use Castle Windsor as IOC container for your CompositeWPF Applications.
  For more information about this adapter, see Castle Windsor Adapter for Prism.
• Spring.NET adapter (contributed by Willem Meints). This adapter allows you to use Spring.NET as IOC container for your CompositeWPF applications.
  For more information about this adapter, see Using Spring.NET as IOC container for Composite WPF.

Download

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

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.

Enjoy!

• 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.

Let’s take a look at the guidance content index:

Because the Composite UI Application Block and the Composite Application Guidance are targeted to build composite applications, they have similar core concepts. These core concepts have different implementations. The following figure compares the implementation of the core concepts.
 

Want more?

Download the Composite Application Guidance for Composite UI Application Block Developers from Codeplex.

Feedback

We really want your feedback on this guidance, so feel free to give us your feedback on the discussion board.

Enjoy!

After downloading and decompressing the latest change set of the source control, you will find a new folder named spikes that contains the Composite Application Library migrated to Silverlight. As you may imagine, there were many challenges that we had to address in order to make it “work”  (Rob Eisenberg wrote two articles describing differences between WPF and Silverlight that you might want to check: There’s some darkness in your silver light and Silverlight Problems That Affect Me).

Note: The migration is not complete, we used the spike to have a perspective of the challenges.

Modularity

Module loading in Silverlight is very different from WPF, so this was a challenge. We continued spiking on different approaches, but those spikes are not uploaded to Codeplex yet.

Regarding the module enumerators, System.Configuration is not supported by Silverlight current version, so we are using a new XML file module enumerator (not published either).

Regions

In WPF, the RegionManager attached property value gets inherited by the elements in the visual tree. This cannot be done in Silverlight due to the lack of the FrameworkPropertyMetadataOptions.Inherits option. However, we have found a workaround for this issue.

If you want to declare regions in XAML, you have to create an application resource to store the RegionManager instance, so it can be used by the views. This can be done in the Bootstrapper, as shown in the code below:

protected override void ConfigureContainer()
{
   base.ConfigureContainer(); IRegionManager regionManager = Container.Resolve<IRegionManager>();
   Application.Current.Resources.Add(“RegionManager”, regionManager);
}

And the view has to explicitly set the RegionManager attached property to the resource created previously.

<ItemsControl x:Name=”MainRegionControl” cal:RegionManager.RegionName=”MainRegion” cal:RegionManager.RegionManager=”{StaticResource RegionManager}” />

Events

Events has been migrated successfully, however, the unit tests are still a challenge because of the differences in threading between Silverlight and WPF. One difference we found, is that if you are subscribing to an event using weak references, for this reason you can only use public methods as delegates (lambdas, anonymous delegates or private methods won’t work) because of security restrictions enforced by Silverlight.

Commands

As you might know, the support for commands is missing in Silverlight. This is really bad news, considering that big part of our guidance talk about using Commands for communication between the modules and from the view.

I’m not going into deep details on this because Julian Dominguez published a great post explaining how to use commands in Silverlight.

Download

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

Notes

• We didn’t ship the Unity Application Block, so I recommend you to see Michael Sync’s post in order to have Unity working on Silverlight.
• In order to run the Unit tests, check Jeff Wilcox’post.

Feedback  / Contributions

Feel free to give us your feedback on the discussion board. If you want to contribute with the CompositeWPF project, check the CompositeWPF contrib. community site.

Enjoy!

• 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.

Let’s explore the latest additions added to the CompositeWPF Contrib project.

• CompositeModuleEnumerator. The CompositeModuleEnumerator makes it possible to combine several module enumerator instances into one module enumerator. This makes it easier for developers to for example combine both fixed modules and modules loaded through the ConfigurationModuleEnumerator.
  
  For more information about the CompositeModuleEnumerator, see Combining module enumerators in CompositeWPF.
• ToolBarPanelRegionAdapter. This adapter adapts control of type System.Windows.Controls.Primitives.ToolBarPanel and derived classes.
• Visual Studio Templates. The goal of these templates is to help users start with the Composite WPF project
  For more information about the Visual Studio Templates, see Composite Application Guidance for WPF Visual Studio Templates.

I’ve been also reorganizing the folder structure of the project, so if you download the latest change set you will find the following structure:

If you want to contribute to the project, please follow the Sign Up Process.

Enjoy!

Once the installation finish, I created a Silverlight Application just to see if everything works as expected. The application was successfully created but when I tried to build and run the solution, I faced with the following error:

After spend some time searching for some clues, I found the following solution:

1. Open the Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt.
2. Execute devenv /ResetSkipPkgs in the command prompt.
   This switch clears all options to skip loading added to VSPackages by users wishing to avoid loading problem VSPackages. This switch also starts Visual Studio.
3. Close Visual Studio and then execute devenv /Setup in the command prompt.
   This switch forces Visual Studio to merge the resource metadata that describes menus, toolbars, and command groups from all VSPackages available
4. Open Visual Studio and have fun.

For more information about the Devenv Command Line Switches, see Devenv Command Line Switches on MSDN.

Hope this helps.

As you may know, in the June 2008 release of the Composite Application Guidance for WPF we are not shipping a guidance package. So, I created two Visual Studio Templates to help you to start with the creation of a solution using the Composite Application Guidance for WPF.

You will get two kind of solution/project templates

After creating a solution using the templates, you must create in the folder where solution its located a folder named Library and copy to it the following assemblies (otherwise the solution created is not going to compile):

• Microsoft.Practices.Composite.dll
• Microsoft.Practices.Composite.Wpf.dll
• Microsoft.Practices.Composite.UnityExtensions.dll
• Microsoft.Practices.Unity.dll
• Microsoft.Practices.ObjectBuilder2.dll

Download the Composite Application Guidance for WPF templates (zip file with a VSI inside)

Any feedback is welcome. Enjoy!