Microsoft has just released the Composite Application Guidance for WPF-June 2008, also known as Prism.
According to Microsoft:
The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. It will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications—composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application.
The Composite Application Guidance for WPF can help you split the development of your WPF client application across multiple development teams. In this type of application, each team is responsible for the development of different pieces of the application, which are seamlessly composed together.
This guidance contains the following:
- A reference implementation
- A reusable library code called the Composite Application Library
- Documentation
- Quick start tutorials
- Hands-on labs
The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is intended for architects and WPF developers according to Microsoft:
This guidance is intended for software architects and software developers who are building enterprise WPF client applications from loosely coupled components developed across multiple teams. The Composite Application Library is built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and Windows Presentation Foundation, and it uses a number of software design patterns. Familiarity with these technologies and patterns is useful for evaluating and adopting the Composite Application Library.
The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is also available as a project on CodePlex, offering the source code under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL). More detailed information about the guidance is available on MSDN.
The supported operating systems are: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Windows XP Professional Edition. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 is necessary for development along with Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 which includes WPF.
InfoQ covered Prism in a news post in May, and we recently interviewed Glenn Block, a Microsoft Technical Product Planner for the Client UX program at patterns & practices, on Prism.