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Free Pluralsight Prism Training

Brian Lagunas — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 04:23:40 +0000

I am excited to announce that Pluralsight and Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices team have joined forces to provide you with free access to over 4 hours of online Prism training. That’s right, you heard me correctly. FREE online Prism training sponsored by the one and only Patterns & Practices team. I know you have some question so let me answer the most common:

Q & A

Q1. When is this free training available?
A1. The entire weekend of Nov 12th 2011 through Nov 14th 2011.

Q2. Do I have to be a Pluralsight subscriber to get this awesome training?
A2. This training will be freely available to everyone. You do not have to be a subscriber.

Q3. What does the course cover?
A3. Well let’s take a look:

Getting started with Prism
Bootstrapper and Shell
Regions
Modules
Views
Communication
State-Based Navigation
View-Based Navigation

More course information.

Q4. Who is the author of this kick ass Prism course?
Q4. That would be me.

Q5. Is it really free?
Q5. You’re kidding right? Didn’t I already cover this part? Yes, it is free.

New and Improved

If you are a subscriber and have already watched the course, I would like to bring to your attention that there have been two new modules added. These modules will cover everything you need to know in order to start using the navigation services provided by Prism. This includes state-based navigation and view-based navigation.

Mark your calendar for Nov 12th and be sure to cram as much Prism knowledge into your brain as you can before the weekend ends. Don’t worry, if you run out of time you can always ask me questions directly. You can contact me either through Twitter (@brianlagunas) or through the Extended WPF Toolkit project site. I hope you enjoy the training.

Prism-fy the Bing Maps WPF Control (Beta)

Brian Lagunas — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:13:02 +0000

If you know me or know of me you are aware that I am a big Prism advocate/evangelist. You may have also noticed that I have been playing around with the new Bing Maps WPF control. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I would find a way to compose a Bing Map of loosely coupled MapLayers at runtime using Prism.

The concept is simple. We want a Bing Maps application that can be extended at runtime. By extended, I mean that I want the ability to add new elements/modules to the Map at runtime. The important thing about these elements/modules is that they can come from anywhere and they should be loosely coupled from the Map as well as other elements/modules that may exist on the Map.

Luckily for us this is extremely simple to accomplish. All we have to do is create a custom RegionAdapter, register it with our Prism application, and then apply it to our Bing Map control. So let’s start with the RegionAdapter.

publicclassMapRegionAdapter : RegionAdapterBase<Map>
 {
public MapRegionAdapter(IRegionBehaviorFactory regionBehaviorFactory)
         : base(regionBehaviorFactory)
     {
     }
     protected override void Adapt(IRegion region, Map regionTarget)
     {
         region.Views.CollectionChanged += (s, e) =>
         {
             if (e.Action == System.Collections.Specialized.NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Add)
             {
                 foreach (FrameworkElement element in e.NewItems)
                     regionTarget.Children.Add(element);
             }
             else if (e.Action == System.Collections.Specialized.NotifyCollectionChangedAction.Remove)
             {
                 foreach (FrameworkElement element in e.OldItems)
                     if (regionTarget.Children.Contains(element))
                         regionTarget.Children.Remove(element);
             }
         };
     }
     protected override IRegion CreateRegion()
     {
         return new AllActiveRegion();
     }
 }

Now in the Bootstrapper we need to register our mapping.

protected override RegionAdapterMappings ConfigureRegionAdapterMappings()
 {
     RegionAdapterMappings mappings = base.ConfigureRegionAdapterMappings();
     mappings.RegisterMapping(typeof(Map), Container.Resolve<MapRegionAdapter>());
     return mappings;
 }

Now we simply give the Map a region name. (this is actually all the shell has in it)

<Grid>
     <bing:Map prism:RegionManager.RegionName="{x:Static inf:RegionNames.MapRegion}" Center="40,-95" ZoomLevel="4" />
 Grid>

That is all there is to it. You can now start injecting modules onto the Map at runtime. Lets look at my two modules I am using as an example. Here is the structure of my application:

ModuleA will inject a MapPolygon in the Shape of Texas.
ModuleB is the Earthquake application we built in an earlier post.
Infrastructure is the project where shared code goes, in this case our MapRegionAdapter
BingMapsPrismfiedDemo is of course our shell project.

This is what the application looks like at runtime when both modules have been injected into it.

Now I can easily add more layers to this map as I see fit. As always, Download the Source and start playing. You may want to add MEF support as well.

BSDG – PRISM/MVVM for WPF Presentation Sample Code

Brian Lagunas — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:40:45 +0000

As promised, I am posting the sample code I covered in the presentation for everyone to download and start playing with. If you have any questions or would like me to discuss a specific aspect in more detail just drop me a line.

Download the Presentation Source. This contains the all sample code that I discussed during the presentation.

Useful links:

The Composite WPF and Silverlight (Prism) website is where you want to start.
Elegant Code Cast of Prism v2 – David Starr, Scott Nichols, and myself sat down with the Patterns and Practices team to discuss Prism.
Channel9 has some good videos available to help you understand and get started using Prism.
WPF Recipes in C# 2008: A Problem-Solution Approach – This is not a Prism book but it is a great book for solving common problems in WPF.

Code Cast 26 – Prism 2.0

David Starr — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:21:18 +0000

Blaine Wastell and Bob Brumfield of Microsoft’s patterns & practices group dropped by the Elegant Code Cast and talked with us about Prism 2.0.

Now in it’s second release, Prism is a guidance package from p&p on building composite applications in WPF, and now in Silverlight!

If you work with large client applications, or are just interested in how this elegant application works, this show is for you.

Download the MP3

Prism on CodePlex
Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight – February 2009
(Includes project linker downloads)
Bob Brumfield’s Blog
Blaine Wastell’s Blog
Prism “How Do I” Screen Casts
Guidance for the Guidance (A good place to get started on Prism)