When designing UI’s in WPF and Silverlight, you may wish to make your layout fluid and auto-expandable in order to take the most out changing UI context. For instance, when data quantity and quality changes, available space may also change and objects in the layout need to adapt to these changes. When an auto layout is needed, no width nor height are specified which can be troublesome since the design view tends to collapse available space. For instance, a variable size user control with a data-binded listbox has no child items in design time, so you’ll see nothing but a...
David Hill from the patterns & practices team posted a very interesting article concerning MEF and Prism. It talks about the benefits your applications get from using these extensibility technologies, but also clears some misunderstandings regarding their purpose. I’ve been faced with this question several times and the online community reflects this same common overlap. While MEF is purely an extensibility API, Prism is a development pattern that allows you to organize and manage your WPF/Silverlight project through modularity and thus isolate requirement and functionality concerns in development teams.
They’re both part of .NET Framework 4.0 and a MUST if you...