Prism & Silverlight: Part 1 - Taking Sketched Code Towards Unity

Posted By: Mike Taulty | Oct 27th @ 3:29 AM | 28,161 Views | 21 Comments
This is part 1 of a series of screencasts illustrating some of the ideas found in "Prism" or the "Composite Application Guidance" from the Patterns and Practices team that can be used to build Silverlight applications in a way that lends itself to testability and modularity.

In talking to customers building business applications with Silverlight I find that Prism (and it's friend Unity) is frequently mentioned but not everyone has seen it and so I thought I would explore it myself and capture some of the results of that exploration here.

We start off with some fairly basic code which we move towards making use of dependency injection and modularity;

and then we move that code into the Silverlight world and try to illustrate some specific areas of Prism;

and then finally we try and bring some of these concepts together in a longer, more realistic example of a simple Email application built using the Prism framework - warning, this is a much longer session but I wanted something that draws things together;

The recommendation would be that you watch the 10 screencasts in order but if that feels like too long a process or if you're already very familiar with concepts like dependency injection and containers like Unity then perhaps watch the last screencast first and then refer back to the previous screencasts if certain areas need more illumination.

I put the source code for Video 10 here for download as it's a bigger set of source and something you might want to explore after the video - this does not necessarily represent "best practise" but is, instead, just meant to illustrate some of the Prism ideas.
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#Oct 27th @ 8:17 AM
Richard.Hein
Richard.Hein
... my guitar gently weeps ...
Thanks, that was good and the presenter is a very fast and flies through the code with impressively few typos ... I find it distracting when someone is typing live code and is constantly correcting typos through the presentation.  That makes it enjoyable to watch and follow along in VS, even if I had to "rewind" repeatedely while catching up.
#Oct 27th @ 9:15 AM
rgruchalski
rgruchalski

Is the lack of audio planned? I mean, I don't mind but this looks somehow strange without audio?

#Oct 27th @ 9:23 AM
Moshe
Moshe

Great video! Very nice to see good software design practices demonstrated in an easy-to-learn video. I was wondering what screen capture software you use to make these?

#Oct 27th @ 11:07 AM
figuerres
figuerres
???

Interesting will have to view this later and see if it helps.

 

from my view right now we have a rainstorm of bits coming out and no really clear directions.

RIA

WCF

ASMX

ADO Entitiy framwork

MVVM

linq to this that and the other....

and

ASP.NET MVC

 

just to name the first few that come to mind

 

and then add Azure (sp?)  and prism and unity

 

Ah we need some UNITY in a really big way right now.....

while beeing able to chose is mostly a good thing when you have so many and so little idea which ones to spend time with it's hard to

get focus on any one thing.

 

also after the way linq to SQL has been sidelined it now makes me ask what other cool stuff that's in the works today will be droped next year?  it's very very frustrating to try and pick the winner like it's a lotto when it's my time and money and my rep on the line.

#Oct 27th @ 1:14 PM
Richard.Hein
Richard.Hein
... my guitar gently weeps ...

There should definitely be audio ... I haven't had any problems.

#Oct 27th @ 2:36 PM
mtaulty
mtaulty
Mike Taulty

Hi,

 

I used Expression Encoder 3 Screen Capture - try it yourself from here http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Encoder_Overview.aspx - the standard version is free and will let you record up to 10 mins of screen capture.

 

Mike.

#Oct 27th @ 2:37 PM
mtaulty
mtaulty
Mike Taulty

No, there's definitely meant to be audio - as a silent movie this is going to be a major flop Smiley

#Oct 27th @ 4:24 PM
rgruchalski
rgruchalski

Yeah, just noticed, on the headphones earlier on I couldn't here the audio at all. Now I can hear it but it is really silent Smiley I found this to be an issue across c9 in general lately. Anyway, this looks like a great series, gonna have a late night tonight!

#Oct 27th @ 5:54 PM
Winston Pang
Winston Pang

Wow, nice, hey I like your wallpapers, care to share them? Looks pretty cool!

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