Prism 2.0 is Live

We are excited to announce that the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight (Prism 2.0) is live. You can download the release from here.

The Composite Client Application Guidance is designed to help you more easily build modular Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client applications.

These types of applications typically feature multiple screens, rich, flexible user interaction and data visualization, and role-determined behavior. They are "built to last" and "built for change." This means that the application's expected lifetime is measured in years and that it will change in response to new, unforeseen requirements. This application may start small and over time evolve into a composite client—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application. Applications that do not demand these features and characteristics may not benefit from the Composite Application Guidance.

 

What's new Prism 2.0?

- Composite Support for Silverlight: We provide guidance on modularity, UI composition, commanding, and event aggregator in Silverlight. The Reference Implementation demonstrates how to use the Prism library with Silverlight.

- Multi-targeting: Ability to share code between Silverlight and WPF. We provide guidance in the form of patterns, documentation, and tooling on how to share code between Silverlight and WPF. The tooling has its own msi that you can download.

- Improved UI Composition: We added View Discovery to UI Composition. View Discovery: when a region is created, the region looks for all the ViewTypes associated with the region and automatically instantiates and loads the corresponding views. This is a simple approach to create new views.

- Hands-on-Lab for Silverlight: We provide a Hands-on-Lab for Silverlight that walks you through how to create your first application using Prism.

- New UI: We upgraded the UI with this release which includes new Silverlight and WPF animations.

- New XAML Guidelines for Creating Composite UIs

- Improved Separated Presentation Pattern Guidance:   With this release we provide more information on Separated Presentation Patterns which includes Supervising Controller and Presentation Model (also known as Model View View Model).

Included in this release:

- Composite Application Library (for both WPF and Silverlight)

- 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

There are four files that you can download with this release. These files are as follows:

- Composite Application Guidance: Which includes the library, reference implementation, quick starts, how to's, patterns, design concepts, and technical concepts

- Project Linker: Tooling to help manage multi-targeted projects.

- Project Linker Source: Source code for the project linker.

- Prism 2.0 Documentation in CHM format: We include the documentation in CHM format if you want to download this separately. The documentation is included in the Guidance and is also available on MSDN.

 

Click here to see the detailed list of assets in the guidance.

 

Evaluating Prism

If you want to evaluate whether Prism is right for your next project, we created a topic in the documentation that helps walk you through the process. The process includes steps to determine if it is right for you, an initial evaluation, an in-depth evaluation, and how to adopt the guidance. The idea with the section is to help you quickly decide if the guidance makes sense for your project. I am very interested in feedback if this hits the mark as we want to minimize your investment of time to make a decision on whether you should use Prism.

Upgrade from Prism 1.0

We tried to minimize the changes to the library that would affect your applications. That said, we do have some changes that are due to Silverlight, improved extensibility, or improved understandability of the library. We have a topic on MSDN that discusses how to upgrade from Prism 1.0.

Migrate from Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) and Composite UI Application Block (CAB)

If you are interested in migrating from SCSF / CAB to Prism 2.0, we provided guidance in this release on how to upgrade your application from SCSF/CAB to Prism 2.0. This version took into account the feedback that we received on Codeplex.

 

Prism 2.0 Videos

Prism 2.0 Introduction: Adam Kinney and Blaine Wastell

Prism 2.0 Overview: Ajoy Krishnamoorthy, Bob Brumfield, and Blaine Wastell

 

Check out the posts from the other Prism team members:

- Bob Brumfield

- David Hill

- Erwin Van Der Valk 

- Julian Dominguez

- Larry Brader

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 18, 2009
  PingBack from http://www.anith.com/?p=11177
• Anonymous
  February 18, 2009
  The Patterns & Practices group at Microsoft have just released Prism version 2. I am pretty exited
• Anonymous
  February 20, 2009
  WooHoo! Prism 2.0 is done and is now live on MSDN! You can access the Prism 2.0 documentation here ,
• Anonymous
  February 26, 2009
  After we published the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight - February 2009 release,