I’ve been doing a lot of reading these last two days on Microsoft Prism, but the thing I’m still not very sure of is what does the future look like for it? I know that version 4.1 was just released a few months ago, but besides Microsoft’s own documentation, I haven’t found many blog posts written in the last year on the subject, most of what I find is 2009-2010.
It definitely looks interesting but the learning curve seems to be a bit steep and I wouldn’t want to embark if it’s going to become obsolete in the near future. Anyone has any insight on this?
Mike, from my perspective it’s not a bad thing that there isn’t much blogging.
PRISM is supported and their message board monitored. There is a big community that uses PRISM. Functionality isn’t being developed – thats’ why not much to blog about, but it’s solid and open-source. P&P team maintaining it and there might be 4.5 release later on when .NET 4.5 comes live.
This is not MVVM framework, and there is a lot of different MVVM frameworks. This is not model or business objects wrapper. This is framework to develop modular composite applications with WPF/Silverlight. And AFAIK there is nothing like this available.
We use their modules, navigations, regions, DelegageCommands, etc. We use pretty much everything available from PRISM and it works great for us. OTOH we did roll out our own MVVM functionality.
P.S. Learning curve WAS painful. Not because it’s bad framework but because there is a lot of functionality (which you can use ala cart btw). At the end it is worth it. I suggest getting their book and reading it quickly just to see what it’s all about. Then you will see when and how you can use their functionality.