[2009.11.01] I spent a Week in PRISM

I had heard of Prism a while ago but never really investigated. When I did take a look at it about a month ago, in all honesty I felt overwhelmed. However, recently I had two interesting conversations and that prompted me to sit down and really get into Prism. I am glad I did as I have learned so much and it has shown me how much more I need to learn as well.

I suppose I am more of a code monkey rather than an architect or a designer. That will change from now on. There is no point in me banging out code when I am only aware of part of the system I am writing for. Going through the Prism docs touches on a lot of concepts that I was not familiar with in the first place. All in all, I know I can't get it all in one reading of the doc, but it's a start. I am much more comfortable with terms like Inversion of Control, Dependency Injection, Delegate Commands (well I got this from learning about Model-View-ViewModel), Event Aggregator, Modules, Bootstrapper, and some Design Patterns. Thus far, all I have done is the basic Hello World in Prism but I hope to do more in the near future. I would like to reference some additional resources that in my opinion, will supplement learning not just Prism, but design and architecture in general.

Prism Related

• Composite Application Guidance (Prism) October 2009
• Prism on Channel 9
• Channel 9 Screencast Series: Creating a modular application using Prism V2
    Part 1/4: Creating a shell and modules
    Part 2/4: Visual Composition
    Part 3/4: Implementing views and services
    Part 4/4: Decoupled Communication
• Tame Your Software Dependencies for More Flexible Apps by James Kovacs [MSDN Magazine March 2008]
• Patterns For Building Composite Applications With WPF by Glenn Block [MSDN Magazine September 2008]
• Brian Noyes on Prism [dnrTV! Screencast 124]
• Brian Noyes on Prism Events and Commands [dnrTV! Screencast 132]
• James Kovacs' Roll-your-own IoC Container [dnrTV! Screencast 126]
• Glenn Block and Brian Noyes on Prism [.NETRocks Audiocast 374]
• Build Composite WPF and Silverlight Applications by Claudio Lassala [CODE Magazine July/August 2009]

Supplemental Information

• Understanding Routed Events and Commands In WPF by Brian Noyes [MSDN Magazine September 2008]
• An Introduction To Domain-Driven Design by David Laribee [MSDN Magazine February]
• WPF Apps With The Model-View-ViewModel Design Pattern by Josh Smith [MSDN Magazine February]
• Jean Paul Boodhoo on Test Driven Development Part 1 Part 2 [dnrTV! Screencast 10 and 11]
• Jean-Paul Boodhoo on Demystifying Design Patterns Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 [dnrTV! Screencast 63, 65, 68, 71, 92]
• David Hayden on the Unity Framework [.NETRocks Audiocast 393]
• Test Driven Development with Jean Paul Boodhoo [.NETRocks Audiocast 168]
• Layered Architecture, Dependency Injection, and Dependency Inversion by Jean Paul Boodhoo [CODE Magazine May/June 2007]
• The Zen of Inversion of Control by Jon Stonecash [CODE Magazine March/April 2009]

Some Books

• Application Architecture Guide 2.0 The Book [Microsoft Patterns and Practices]
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
• Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software
• C# 3.0 Design Patterns