Building Composite Applications with WPF

If you are building an application that consist of a visual portal that incorporates data from several other applications then you need to take a look at Prism.   Prism is a framework based on a design pattern for building Composite Applications using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

A Composite Application consists of loosely coupled modules that are dynamically discovered and composed at run time. Modules contain visual and non-visual components representing the different vertical slices of the system.  The visual components (views) are composed in a common shell that acts as the host for all of the applications content.

 

The Microsoft patterns & practices team recently shipped the first version of Composite Application Guidance for WPF (available at microsoft.com/CompositeWPF). The new guidance was designed to leverage the capabilities and programming model of WPF. At the same time, the team also improved upon the design of previous composite application guidance based on feedback from internal product teams, customers, and the .NET community.

 

For more information on Prism see this MSDN library article which covers it in detail.

 

Bill Zack