SA Developer .NET

Hi all,

 

   Not sure if any of you went to Ayal Rosenberg's session at Tech-Ed on Microsoft Prism (now released as CAG). After reading through Glenn Block's posts on Prism, it would seem like it is *the* replacement for CAB's using WPF...especially since Acropolis has been folded into a future version of the framework. Is anyone looking at using CAG for LoB apps? I've taken a very preliminary architecture decision to redevelop our horrible framework using CAG, at least as a PoC, and then to figure out whether it will work for us moving forward. I am a little nervous of re-educating the juniors to use WPF when designing screens, as they're all Windows Forms bunnies, but that's just a training methodology thing. Any thoughts?

 

-Ric

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And so the kief looked and lo, it was kief.

Hey there,

I attended the CAL session as well and it does seem like this is the way to go for all composite applications and smart client development using WPF. We have an application that was written with our own framework, pre-CAB and should we decide to re-write it as a smart client it will definitely be done using CAL, albeit it with the learning curve you mentioned.

I think in general the sooner all .NET developers get on the WPF, WCF and WWF band wagon the better otherwise they are just going to fall further and further behind sadly.

-Pat Ramadass

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The only source of knowledge is experience.

That's exactly it - also, in the "5 Cool Things You Should Know and Use" session, the guy showed the WPF/WinForms interop, so if they're hellishly insistent on using WinForms to develop a screen then they must learn how to embed it in WPF.

 

On an aside, did you see the that they now have Infrastructure and View modules? I think we'll be exposing our services as an infrastructure module, that way if we move to WCF later we just need to rewrite the infrastructure module and not redo an entire communications layer.

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And so the kief looked and lo, it was kief.

Hey again,

Ah, I missed that one sadly, must look into the embedding more then. I suppose they have to provide something like that as there is going to be tons of legacy code, especially with LOB Apps, that just wont make sense to re-write.

The modularised/component based approach is awesome and definitely lends itself to items being "swapped out". I think we'll try do a small prototype in the coming weeks.

 -Pat Ramadass

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The only source of knowledge is experience.

Keep me in the loop - I'd love to know how you guys progress!

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And so the kief looked and lo, it was kief.

Hi Sadly I also went to Ayal's presentation.

Just a word of caution surrounding the winforms form that is hosted in a wpf application- take note of the rendering order. The winforms form will be rendered last so that may cause issues that it "overlaps" other wpf regions etc.

 

Niel

Hey there,

 Thanks for the advice, will keep it in mind.

 CAL seems to be known on the MS sites...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc707890.aspx

 ...seemingly part of the CAG.

Thanks,

 -Pat Ramadass

 

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The only source of knowledge is experience.

Hi Neil, Yeah, I noticed that too when I read Glenn's posts on it and started going through the CAG documentation. It would appear that the CAL is just an (open-source) library of functions you may find useful in developing composite apps, and not necessarily even an essential part of CAG. Still, nothing could be worse than the Developing Usable Frameworks in .NET 3.5 and VS2008 chalk and talk session. Apart from the Derivco guy being the only one that did any talking, I was left wondering when he was going to discuss stuff that didn't apply to framework 1.1. He seemed to treat us all as entry level developers, and then embarrassed himself by failing to get his nonsensical demo's to work - a scene he punctuated all too often with "epic fail" or "double epic fail", which only served to annoy the room. The CAG (CAL?) talk at least provided a rough primer, and it piqued my interest in DependancyObject's:) Ric

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And so the kief looked and lo, it was kief.