Using Prism in Universal Windows apps

Our Windows Apps developer specialist from Italy, Matteo Pagani, has written a new blog series about taking advantage of PRISM in your apps. Read on!


Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) is the most used pattern to create applications based on XAML technologies for WPF, Silverlight or Window Store apps. MVVM helps developers to separate the application’s logic from the user interface, allowing them to reuse the business logic with great testability and maintainability.

When Microsoft has introduced Universal Windows apps to share a common codebase between a Window and a Windows Phone app, the MVVM pattern has become even more important. The goal is to share as much as business logic as possible but, at the same time, to keep the user interface for the two platforms separated due to very different form factors. This way, developers are able to write the logic just once and to optimize the user experience for smartphones, tablets and computers.

Prism is a MVVM framework created by the Patterns & Practices division in Microsoft. Other than providing the basic features required to support the pattern, it offers a set of helpers that make easier for Universal Windows apps developers to support specific requirements like navigation, application’s lifecycle management, etc.

The following series of posts will help developers to understand the basic concepts of Prism applied to Universal Windows apps and to leverage all the platform specific features:

  1. The basic concepts
  2. Binding and commands
  3. Advanced commands
  4. Navigation
  5. Managing the application's lifecycle
  6. Messages
  7. Layout management

The samples that are used in the posts are available on GitHub at the following URL: https://github.com/qmatteoq/Prism-UniversalSample