I'm psyched that the Composite Application Guidance for WPF thingy from patterns and practices has shipped. This is a project I worked on as a part time developer for Microsoft for the last 6 months. It is something that you should really take a look at if you are building complex WPF applications and care about decoupling, testability, and maintainability.

You can find some more high level info on Glenn Block's blog here, and my previous post here.

You can get the bits here.

The only thing I'm unhappy with is what the hell to call this thing. We called it Prism as a code name during development. For legal reasons, we could not use that as a release name. The p&p guys don't want us calling it CAG because there were some negative connotations with that acronym. It has a set of libraries in it that are collectively called CAL (Composite Application Libraries), but the thing that is shipping includes documentation, how-to's, a reference implementation app, and quickstarts, so the shipping thingy is a lot more than just CAL. Due to mainly internal politics at Microsoft, you can't call it a "product" because p&p is not a product team and therefore can't ship "products". p&p also makes some subtle distinction and says this is not a "Guidance Package", as some of their previous offerings have been called. Its a "set of Guidance", whatever that is...

So I'm continuing to call it Prism for now. Its a lot easier to say in a sentence than "the Composite Application Guidance for WPF set of guidance which is not a product or a guidance package but which you get a bunch of stuff with".

Anyway, check it out and expect some more detailed posts and possibly some screencasts showing how to use it.

Thursday, July 03, 2008 5:14:13 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
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