Blogs|Aug 27, 2010

Fluent Validation with MEF and PRISM

Validation is a topic that comes up quite frequently. One concern is how to honor DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principles and create a framework that is reusable across layers. There are some very robust and tested frameworks out there, but sometimes they might be more than what you are looking for. In this post, I’ll…
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Blogs|Jul 26, 2010

Silverlight UI Automation Testing using Prism 4.0

One popular gripe about Silverlight has been the lack of integrated testing tools. There are several types of tests you may perform against a software project. Unit tests can be performed with the aid of the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework and automated with a third-party tool such as StatLight. Automation testing involves hosting the actual…
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wintellect-blogs|Jun 16, 2010

Silverlight UI Automation and Full VS 2010 Integration

OK, so it’s not exactly “out of the box” but the most recent PRISM 4.0 Drop (drop 2) seems to contain something Silverlight developers have been begging for … for quite some time. It’s buried within the “QuickStart” folder under the “BasicMVVM” project. This project provides guidance for the Model-View-ViewModel pattern and is worth a…
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wintellect-blogs|Mar 1, 2010

MEF instead of PRISM for Silverlight 3 Part 2 of 2: Region Management

In my last post, I showed you how to dynamically load modules on demand using the latest MEF release in Silverlight 3. This post, I will take you through managing regions with MEF. This will enable us to have a 100% MEF-based solution in Silverlight 3 if the only pieces of PRISM we were using…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 26, 2010

MEF instead of PRISM for Silverlight 3 Part 1 of 2: Dynamic Module Loading

Recently I’ve been having lots of conversations about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), the Composite Application Library (CAL or PRISM), and how they relate. One point of confusion that many people has comes when they try to force the two solutions to work together. In a recent conversation, I mentioned that PRISM has some great…
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wintellect-blogs|Feb 25, 2010

Vancouver Olympics – How’d We Do That?

The Silverlight team recently posted a blog entry entitled “Vancouver Olympics – How’d we do That?” in which they detailed the massive effort across multiple partners to pull together the on-line solution for streaming HD videos, both live and on demand. This was an exciting post for Wintellect and me because it detailed the effort…
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Blogs|Jan 10, 2010

Auto-Discoverable Views using Fluent PRISM in Silverlight

One reason a developer would use a technology like MEF is to, as the name implies, make an application extensible through a process called discovery. Discovery is simply a method for locating classes, types, or other resources in an assembly. MEF uses the Export tag to flag items for discovery, and the composition process then…
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Blogs|Jan 3, 2010

PRISM, MEF, and MVVM Part 3 of 3: Dynamic MEF Modules in PRISM

Series recap: PRISM, MEF, and MVVM Part 1 of 3: Unity Glue PRISM, MEF, and MVVM Part 2 of 3: Making PRISM MEF Friendly PRISM, MEF, and MVVM Part 3 of 3: Dynamic MEF Modules in PRISM In the final part of this series, I will show a dynamically loaded module (using PRISM) that takes…
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Blogs|Dec 30, 2009

PRISM, MEF, and MVVM Part 2 of 3: Making PRISM MEF Friendly

In the first part of this series, we explored using the Unity container to bind the view model to the view. The next logical step is to explore how to use MEF. PRISM provides several useful mechanisms that relate directly to views and modules, such as the region manager and the module manager. This allows…
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Blogs|Dec 21, 2009

PRISM, MEF and MVVM Part 1 of 3: Unity Glue

PRISM, also known as Composite WPF, has established itself as a very popular framework for building modular, scalable Silverlight applications. A newer contender, the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), has also grown in popularity. In fact, these two frameworks have left people scratching their heads wondering which one to use, when, how, and why. Download the…
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wintellect-blogs|Dec 8, 2009

MVVM Composition in Silverlight 3 with Prism

This post explores how to manage multiple view models across modules in a Prism-based Silverlight application. One powerful feature of Prism is the ability to dynamically load modules. This allows reduction of the XAP file size, as well as encourages a smaller memory footprint as certain modules are not brought into the application until they…
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Blogs|Nov 18, 2009

Dynamic Module Loading with Silverlight Navigation using Prism

I started a project to update my personal website using Silverlight. The goal is to use Prism/Composite Application Guidance to build out a nice site that demonstrates some Silverlight capabilities and make the source code available as a reference. One of the first pieces I chose to tackle was ensuring I could facilitate deep linking…
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