WPF and Composite Application Library – Missing The Point
- by David Totzke
I have a headache and it’s not even 9AM yet. Well, ok, it’s nearly ten here now in GMT –5 but it’s before nine somewhere still. Sometimes people will miss the point of something so utterly and completely that one is left wondering how such a person can even dress themselves. Writing an application using WPF and the Composite Application Library (Prism) means that one must learn the various programming idioms common to these frameworks. The Windows Forms event driven model simply will not suffice. You need to come to grips with the idea of a very loosely coupled application. Concepts that must be absorbed and internalized include Data Binding, Control and Data Templates, Commands, Dependency Injection, and Inversion of Control, as well as the Supervising Controller, Presentation Model and Model-View-View-Model patterns. It is as simple as that. Not to embrace these concepts is to invite pain. It is to invite noodles; and not the holy kind. Someone actually said to me that “just because it’s not WPF, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.” And he’s right. Unless, of course, you are writing a WPF application and especially if you are using the Composite Application Library. In simple terms then; YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG! Dave Just because I can…
