Prism 2: Now With Silverlight
Back in the fall on our Northeast Roadshow, I presented on the various User Interface Experience options available for both smart client and browser-based applications. At the end of the discussion, I mentioned the Composite Application Guidance for WPF (also known by its code name of Prism). That body of work, the product of Microsoft’s patterns & practices team, was focused on helping you build enterprise-level, composite client applications, namely focusing on building loosely-coupled, pluggable components that can work together in the overall application.
While many of the ideas and techniques espoused by that guidance transcend WPF itself, there was obviously a “hole” in that Silverlight was not specifically addressed. At the time of my presentation, I mentioned a Silverlight version was ‘in the works’, and today the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight 2.0 was announced:
- offering insight on building modular and composite Silverlight applications,
- simplifying the composition of the user interface, and
- providing guidance and light tooling on reusing code between Silverlight and WPF.
I’ve bolded part of the last point because it’s the most compelling piece of this to me. It’s the first official recommendation I’ve seen for the oft-asked question of best practices for delivering WPF and Silverlight experiences from a common code-base. I'm hoping it will help ease some of that “analysis paralysis” that we all have when trying to best leverage a new technology (or in this case TWO new techologies!).
“In the box” (so to speak), you’ll find the following. Enjoy!
- Composite Application Library,
- Reference Implementation (Stock Traders application in WPF and Silverlight),
- Quick starts (9),
- How-Tos (26), and
- Lots of documentation for everything you want to know about UI patterns and client architectures.