I figured that since I wrote my original composite extensions for Prism 1 on an airplane, I should keep up the tradition. On the way home from speaking in Evansville Indiana last night (not surprisingly on Prism), I got all the code in my composite extensions updated to Prism 2.

So if you like the modularity and pub-sub events story from Prism and would like to be able to do those same things in a Windows Forms or other kind of .NET application, you can easily do so now with these CompositeExtensions.

These extensions allow you to use the modular loading patterns and capabilities of Prism as well as the pub/sub events in a Windows Forms application, or any other kind of application (even console apps, WCF services, etc.).

The key pieces remain the same:

A CompositeEvent class that has all the same capability as the CompositePresentationEvent class in Prism2, but is not tied to the WPF libraries at all. For the UI thread dispatching capability, it uses the SynchronizationContext class (which is used under the covers by both WPF and Windows Forms, so this class will also work with WPF).

A SimpleUnityBootstrapper class that removes the tie to WPF in the bootstrapper by removing the creation of the shell and the region adapter stuff.

The  code also include a sample Windows Forms application that uses the extensions to load a module and fire and handle pub-sub events. As mentioned in the original post, I also demonstrate a simple way of using the DI container (Unity in this case) to achieve a Region-Manager like UI composition ability in Windows Forms.

Check it out and let me know if you have any feedback.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 7:34:08 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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