Julian Dominguez Blog

The Composite Application Guidance for WPF (formerly known as Prism) was finally released as Release Candidate in the codeplex site. The final release will be published on MSDN soon.

If you haven’t been following the weekly drops, here’s a quick summary of the contents, as this guidance comes in many forms, such as:

• 
  

  Composite Application Library

  This class library comes in form of source code. You can build it, reference it, extend it, modify it, extract pieces of it, or do whatever you feel like with it because it’s under Ms-PL (all the source code in the release, including CAL, the Reference Implementation and QuickStarts, are under this license).

  The Composite Application Library is designed to address requests from architects and developers who create WPF client applications and need to accomplish the following:

  • Build clients composed of independent, yet cooperating, modules.
  • Separate the concerns of module builders from the concerns of the shell developer; by doing this, business units can concentrate on developing domain-specific modules instead of the WPF architecture.
  • Use an architectural framework to produce a consistent and high quality integrated application.

• Documentation

  Totally wicked documentation! It’s useful for both architects and developers. This is not the typical last minute documentation after a project ends, but an awesome first class citizen of the project… you should definitely check it out.
  

• Reference Implementation

  [The RI] is an application that illustrates the baseline architecture. Within the application, you will see solutions for common, and recurrent, challenges that developers face when creating composite WPF applications.

  The reference implementation is not a real-world application; however, it is based on real-world challenges customers are facing. When you look at this application, do not look at it as a reference point for building a stock trader application… instead, look at is as a reference for building a composite application.

  

• QuickStart sample applications
  

  The QuickStarts [...] are brief, easy-to-understand illustrations of key software factory activities. QuickStarts are an ideal starting point if you want to gain an understanding of a key concept and you are comfortable learning new techniques by examining source code. The Composite Application Guidance includes the following QuickStarts:

  • Dynamic Modularity
  • UI Composition
  • Commanding
  • Event Aggregation

I guess all that is left is for you to download it and try it out, as it is very easy to consume and find out if it’s good for you or your team.

Remember there is also a community and active forums to help you building you composite applications with the library. So if you have any issues, doubts, comments, feedback, please stop by the codeplex discussion list for the project.

Happy coding!

Download Composite Application Guidance for WPF

UPDATE: Link to final release landing page on MSDN

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