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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T03:57:45+00:00

My team and I are beginning to plan the development of a modular application

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My team and I are beginning to plan the development of a modular application which will likely multi-target WPF & Silverlight.

I personally have some experience using the older version of PRISM to build a composite Silverlight app using the MVVM pattern. We weren’t familiar with MEF at the time for handling the various module dependencies, so we didn’t use it.

We aren’t married to any particular framework, but want to use one of the bigger players out there. As such we’ve begun to examine Caliburn/Caliburn Micro, Prism, MVVM Light and Reactive UI.

Most of what I’ve read for modularity suggests PRISM and MEF to handle that part of the process. As I’m still wrapping my head around some of this, I’m not sure if I’m missing some obvious options. I was able to find this article on Caliburn Micro and MEF.

Can anyone point me to similar articles using some of the other frameworks to compose a composite app similarly to the way PRSIM uses Regions, etc? Ideally, I’d like to limit the number of frameworks needed while providing maximum flexibility. We aren’t averse to taking a “best of breed” approach and using for example MEF/PRISM to handle the compositing and MVVM Light for the View management, etc; but why use 2 when 1 will do?

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  1. Editorial Team

    One thing you should probably do first is isolate these into their appropriate buckets. I see this a lot where people will mix MVVM frameworks with application composition frameworks. Once you have them in the appropriate buckets you can start to pick one framework from each category and combine them into what you consider to be the best scenario.

    Application Composition

    • Prism (using any IoC container: MEF, Unity, Ninject, Autofac, etc. There are a few things that make MVVM easier with Prism, but I wouldn’t call it a fully featured MVVM framework… it’s primarily a modular application composition framwork.)
    • MEF (MEF is actually able to do application composition out of the box. It’s often dismissed as just an IoC framework, but it is deceptively powerful.)

    MVVM Frameworks

    • ReactiveUI (my favorite)
    • Caliburn
    • Caliburn Micro
    • MVVM Light

    This will help you make a decision, I think. You can pick and application composition technology you like and an MVVM framework you like and be off and running to the races.

    As for articles, I don’t have too many. There are a lot of good articles on application composition with Prism (that’s pretty much its job), but here is a good article on application composition with MEF by itself:

    http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tomershamam/archive/2009/08/11/wpf-mef-declarative-composite-ui.aspx

    You should also check out Glenn Block’s series “Building HelloMEF” on his blog. I couldn’t find a comprehensive list (he wasn’t consistent with his tagging), but here is the “MEF” tag. Lots of good stuff here:

    http://blogs.msdn.com/b/gblock/archive/tags/mef/default.aspx?PageIndex=1

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