Karl Shifflett released the final release of Prism 4 to MSDN on November 12. Prism is meant to provide guidance around building rich flexible Windows Presentation Foundation applications, Silverlight applications and Windows Phone 7 applications. Provided are design patterns to help an architect build applications out of loosely coupled components referred to by Microsoft as composite applications.
Included are sample code, Quickstarts, and extensive documentation. Prism targets the 4.0 versions of Silverlight and the .NET Framekwork as well as Windows Phone 7 development.
Simultaneously, Karl Shiffilet also published the first installment of a series of multimedia training that is consumed within Visual Studio 2010 called, In the Box. This is the brand name for a series of CBT Feature extensions he’ll be releasing over time. The first release is MVVM Training based on the Model View ViewModel pattern based on Martin Fowler’s Presentation Model. The next installment will be on Prism 4.
To begin using Prism 4, developers will need:
- Visual Studio 2010 Professional or better
- .NET Framework 4.0
- Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio
- Windows Phone Developer Tools SDK
Thus far, community buzz on Prism 4 has been positive with only a few complaints of the lacking features around Windows Phone 7 support.