Jack @ ASP.NET

Prism was designed to help you design and build rich, flexible, and easy-to-maintain WPF and Silverlight applications. The Prism Library implements design patterns that embody important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling. Using the design patterns and capabilities provided by the Prism Library, you can design and build applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but that can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application.

Prism is designed around the core architectural design principles of separation of concerns and loose coupling. This allows Prism to provide many benefits, including the following:

• Reuse. Prism promotes reuse by allowing components and services to be easily developed, tested and integrated into one or more applications. Reuse can be achieved at the component level through the reuse of unit-tested components that can be easily discovered and integrated at run time through dependency injection, and at the application level through the use of modules that encapsulate application-level capabilities that can be reused across applications.
• Extensibility. Prism helps to create applications that are easy to extend by managing component dependencies, allowing components to be more easily integrated or replaced with alternative implementations at run time, and by providing the ability to decompose an application into modules that can be independently updated and deployed. Many of the components in the Prism Library itself can also be extended or replaced.
• Flexibility. Prism helps to create flexible applications by allowing them to be more easily updated as new capabilities are developed and integrated. Prism also allows WPF and Silverlight applications to be developed using common services and components, allowing the application to be deployed and consumed in the most appropriate way. It also allows applications to provide different experiences based on role or configuration.
• Team Development. Prism promotes team development by allowing separate teams to develop and even deploy different parts of the application independently. Prism helps to minimize cross-team dependencies and allows teams to focus on different functional areas (such as UI design, business logic implementation, and infrastructure code development), or on different business-level functional areas (such as profile, sales, inventory, or logistics).
• Quality. Prism can help to increase the quality of applications by allowing common services and components to be fully tested and made available to the development teams. In addition, by providing fully tested implementations of common design patterns, and the guidance needed to fully leverage them, Prism allows development teams to focus on their application requirements instead of implementing and testing infrastructure code.

WPF is a set of .NET Framework classes that you can use to build attractive and functional UIs for Windows-based client applications.

WPF uses the DirectX graphics engine to provide sophisticated graphics and efficient rendering.

WPF enables you to develop applications by using both declarative markup and managed code.

Typically, you use XAML to implement the appearance of your application and you use a .NET Framework managed programming language, such as C#, to implement behavior.

This separation of appearance from behavior offers many advantages when you build graphical applications.

For example, designers can work on the appearance of an application at the same time as developers independently work on the code-behind functionality.

You can use WPF to create stand-alone applications and applications that are hosted in a Web browser.

When you create stand-alone applications, you use the Window class and you use menu bars, toolbars, and dialog boxes as the building blocks of your application.

When you create browser-hosted applications, you use the Page class as your foundation and you provide hyperlinks to enable users to navigate between the pages in your application.

In both cases, you can use the Application class to share session data, properties, and resources across your application.

WPF includes many other features that enhance the experience of the developer and the end user.

For example, the WPF layout system makes it easy for you to develop controls and layouts that adapt to differing window sizes and display settings.

This is an essential part of the modern user experience.

The WPF data-binding system makes it easy for you to implement two-way data binding between controls and data sources.

Finally, the graphics system includes support for highly sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, three-dimensional graphics, and animations that you can use to create genuinely engaging applications.