Today we will see the modularity concept of Prism. Probably the best part of it, as it will allow us to build a real plug-and-play application where the main Shell won’t know anything about the modules. Discover and load the module. What does it mean? As we saw in the previous article, we have declared a reference in our Shell for the hello world module. In this way we force the Shell to be compiled including in the shell project a reference to the Hello World module. Fine, but what happen if we want to replace this module...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ Today we will build the skeleton of our application using the latest version of Prism, available in this section of MSDN: Prism February 2009. One of the reasons that I didn't write anything concrete until now is the fact that I knew that the new version of Prism was coming this month. The classic Hello World application. As for every tutorial, is always better to start with the classic Hello World in order to understand, step by step, how...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ Design of a Rich Interface using WPF. WPF is a very powerful language and allows you to do everything you want. The only problem is that Microsoft didn’t release yet a rich toolkit with all the controls we need and the XAML is not easy to learn. Before starting to build a UI, usually, I follow these 3 fundamental steps. 1. Main layout of my application (MDI, Tab, Ribbon …) 2. Style of my application (Custom,...

Good morning everybody, first of all I want to apologize for my absence in December. I am really sorry but I was ‘trying’ to deliver a component in my office and I was so busy and tired that I didn’t have time for the blog. Let’s start this ‘holiday’ posts with an interesting review of a software architecture book written by two friends of mine: Andrea Salatarello and Dino Esposito. The title is: Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise (PRO-Developer) (Paperback) available at Amazon.com for 29.69 USD. Chapters and sections. The book...

Configure your Customer lookup and run it on IIS 7.0 In the previous article we saw how to use WCF (a basic approach) and what we should keep in consideration if we want to use SOA as our repository. Now we need to: Change the WCF service to point to a real database Test the service Build a web site to host our service Host the web site on IIS 7.0 The the final result ...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ Starting with WCF. Today we will see how WCF works and what are the best practices we should use in order to keep our application safe and maintainable. WCF startup. I assume that you know already what is WCF and what’s the difference between WCF and the old Web Service technology. If you don’t, this is a nice overview of WCF, and this is a nice overview of the differences from these 2 technologies. The big difference...

Service Oriented Application. Introduction. The first problems I always encounter when I design a scalable, multi-tier application are: Work on a disconnected environment but be able to work with the data previously downloaded. Keep always the data up to date, notify the users when the data changes. Threading and UI performances, do not provide frozen screen when the user requests the data. Synchronization from the database and the disconnected environment. Those are common problems of a complex software and can be solved using...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ Value and business validation with Enterprise Library 4.1 and Entity Framework. In this article I will show you how to validate a domain using the enterprise library 4.1 over the Entity Framework. First of all I want to talk about the validation and the thousands of implementations you can find over the web. In my opinion there are 2 different types of validation. The value validation and the business validation. What’s the difference? The first, the value validation...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ Build a generic repository with the Entity Framework. In the previous series of articles about M-V-VM we used the AdventureWorks database, available on CodePlex. After this article (configure a data layer with LinQ-to-SQL) I have got some reader’s emails asking me this and that. So, I am going to give you all those answers right now. Download and configure the Adventure Works database. On my dev PC I have SQL Server 2008 Standard version, but...

Update: source code and documentation are now available on CodePlex at this address: http://prismtutorial.codeplex.com/ In these series of articles I will show you how to build an enterprise application using the most recent Microsoft’s technologies like: WPF with PRISM for the UI, Entity Framework for the Data Layer and WCF for the persistence service. Specifications. We will build a 3 tiers application that will spread the responsibility through 3 different machines (virtually because the Visual Studio solution is only one). SQL Server It will...

I am starting to work on a really interesting project where BizTalk and WCF will be the keys. I have used in the past WCF and I am not worried about it, I like it and it’s better than the old Web Services. Unfortunately I know BizTalk but I still do not master it. Over the network I didn’t find anything really useful but Microsoft has tons of tutorials and how to. Overview of BizTalk 2009 http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/en/us/roadmap.aspx Getting Started http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa560946%28BTS.10%29.aspx Step-by-step with some databases (Oracle, Siebel …)...