Prism 4.0 Plans

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The patterns & practices Client Team just published a blog post on the p&p team blog that describes our plans for Prism vNext. The post answers two questions that we get with regards to Prism:

  • Can I use Prism with WPF/Silverlight development?
  • What’s in Prism 4.0

Prism 2.1 was tested by the sustaining engineering team against the beta and release candidates of WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. We found very minor issues with the Stock Trader Reference Implementation and the unit test. If you need to upgrade now, you can use these blog post as a starting point:

Once .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0 are released, we will create a version of Prism that addresses the issues.

We are starting to work on Prism 4.0 now. We plan to start development on Prism 4.0 in April and plan to finish in September. As part of this project, we will create a survey asking you to prioritize the areas that you need guidance. In a previous blog post I asked you to participate in a discussion on Codeplex to help us understand your requirements. This discussion will be used as input to create the survey. Once the survey is ready, we will create a blog post announcing the survey is open.

Based upon the feedback we received, we are considering the following technical areas for Prism 4.0:

  • Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) Integration
  • Extended Support for Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM)
  • Data Access & Application Services
  • Design-Time Support

For more details about each of these areas check out the post. We look forward to your feedback on the vision and the drops.

A number of you continue asking about examples of Prism in action. For those that attended MIX 2010, Scott Guthrie mentioned the Silverlight Rough Cut Editor in his Key Note Address. The Rough Cut Editor was created using Prism. Tim Osborn’s blog talks about a session at MIX that is discussing the Rough Cut Editor and its architecture. The Rough Cut Editor is a Silverlight video editing application that was used by NBC and Canadian TV to create highlights and online replays for the Olympic events.