Composite Application Guidance for WPF

We try to regularly update our guidance library with content we have developed to meet the demands of architects and application developers seeking guidance on how to apply Microsoft’s array of products and technologies to common application development scenarios and technical challenges,

We recently shipped the latest edition to our guidance library - Composite Application Guidance for WPF

 

This composite guidance covers many of the scenarios covered by our Composite Application Block (CAB), With this new release, we target WPF and incorporate feedback and learnings from CAB. This guidance package is designed to help developers more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will guide developers through the design and build steps for flexible composite WPF client applications - composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.The solutions built in this mannerwill take advantage of the full power of WPF and will be highly maintainable, testable, and broken down in such a way that the various pieces can be developed by separate teams.

 

Composite Application Guidance and CAB were inspired by applications such as the Dell call center application that is used by call center representatives to provide a task centric experience. This reduced the need to copy and paste between applications. Additionally it reduced the average call time and increased efficiency and effectiveness of the sales process.

Some of the focus areas for this guidance package include:

§ Modularity: The Composite Application Library promotes modularity by allowing you to implement business logic, visual components, infrastructure components, presenter or controller components, and any other objects the application requires, in separate modules. Developers can easily create the UI and implement business logic independently of each other.

§ User Interface Composition: The Composite Application Library promotes user interface composition by allowing you to implement visual components from various loosely coupled visual components, known as views, which may reside in separate modules. The visual components may display content from multiple back-end systems. To the user, it appears as one seamless application.

Within this package you will find a reference implementation, a composite application library for WPF, Quickstart guides, a Hands on Lab and over 300 pages of documentation including UI designer guidance and How-To’s.

You can get access to this guide via MSDN here, or through the CodePlex here. There are various customers who are using this guidance today to build their real world applications including accounting firms, large banks and government agencies.

Namaste!