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 are developing big applications and/or needing your software to be extensible.

Check out the article here.

My presentation was yesterday. It took place in main room 5 at 2:30 PM. Overall I guess it went okay, taking into consideration that I nearly had no time to sleep in the previous 4 days… Yeah… It sucks… I had to work over the weekend all night long till monday, so I tool thursday to prepare my presentation. I wasn’t expecting this but, it comes with the job.

Also due to my current ongoing project at Microfil, I wasn’t able to stay in the event both days, so I ended up going back to Oporto in the same day. Today the event ends and I hope everything goes well acoording to Microsoft Portugal expectations.

So, here’s DevDays 2009 Prism deck. Feel free to contact me if need any help.

Composite Application Guidance for WPF 2008 RC1 is now available for download. It has complete source code of the Composite Application Library and some quickstarts for you to get aquainted with this framework.

“The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications – applications that use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together within the overall application.

This release is the first release of composite application guidance for WPF; based on your feedback, this guidance will evolve in future releases. It is marked as a release candidate as its final destintation is MSDN scheduled within a couple weeks. We don’t expect the content to change before going to MSDN.”

Available quickstarts:

Commanding
Event Aggregation
Hello World
Modularity
UI Composition

It also comes with the StockTrader Reference Implementation that uses Unity IoC for Dependency Injection as well as a sparse amount of the Enterprise Library Logging Application Block and Exception Handling Block for infrastrucutre services.

Even though the Composite Application Guidance for WPF comes out as a RC, it isn’t expected to change before the final release.

Check it out here.