Windows Presentation Foundation Prism is now available from Microsoft. Prism is nothing more than the Composite Application Guidance for WPF, resources designed to streamline the building of programs aimed at the corporate environment. With architects and developers of the WPF client applications as the target audience, the guidance is set up to deliver a variety of design patterns that will end up in programs taking advantage of .NET Framework 3.5. In the end, Prism will provide a great deal of simplification to the development process while at the same time enabling a high standard of quality for WPF applications.

"The Composite Application Guidance for WPF is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) client applications. This guidance will help you design and build flexible composite WPF client applications - composite applications use loosely coupled, independently evolvable pieces that work together in the overall application," revealed Nick MacKechnie, Senior Technical Account Manager at Microsoft New Zealand, citing the original documentation from Microsoft.

MacKechnie emphasized the efforts done by Microsoft when putting together the guidance to enable developers to separate the building process across various teams in an organization, and to increase testing flexibility and maintainability.

Still, the most relevant factor for the development process is modularity. By focusing on permitting developers to take advantage of a modular approach, Prism essentially breaks up an application into objects. In this regard, modules containing aspects of the WPF solution can be built separately and then combined in the final product.

"Developers can easily create the UI and implement business logic independently of each other. The Composite Application Library promotes user interface composition by allowing you to implement visual components from various loosely coupled visual components, known as views, which may reside in separate modules. The visual components may display content from multiple back-end systems. To the user, it appears as one seamless application," MacKechnie added.