A New WPF Composite Client Announced; Acropolis Core Goes Into .NET

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Windows Presentation Composite Client

For those ISV's who have been looking forward to a way to combine WinForm controls within a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client, Glen Block has announced the Windows Presentation Composite Client in his blog, My Technobabble. The WPF Composite Client is a project of the patterns & practices team. While the project is similar to Composite Application Block (CAB), the WPF Composite Client is a new set of libraries and guidance.

The team is incorporating lessons learned around patterns such as Modularity (composition), services, dependency injection, event brokering. and others.

The plan is to create a set of deliverables to be shipped piecemeal rather than just one giant “factory” release. Look for everything to ship before the end of 2008.

Acropolis

As for Acropolis, the team has announced the core Acropolis concepts will be rolled into future .NET Framework releases and into Silverlight. In her blog posting A new phase for the Acropolis project Kathy Kam advises:

If you have evaluated Acropolis and are unsure whether to adopt it for your project, or to use the existing CAB, or to wait for the new guidance, our guidance for this situation remains the same - if you are building a Windows Forms LOB (line of business) composite client (with maybe rich islands of WPF content) you should carefully evaluate the current CAB release. If you are specifically interesting in building composite applications on .NET 3.5, please get involved with the Patterns & Practices project and help us to deliver a guidance package that meets your requirements.