Before this year, I spent a lot of time learning and developing with CAB (the Component UI Application Block). This was a great opportunity to sharpen my skills for using good object oriented design princples (like favoring composition-over-inheritance and depending on abstractions, not details). The trouble with CAB is that it is a heavyweight beast of a framework and it takes an average developer an inordinate amount of time to become productive when using it. Fortunately, Microsoft listened to the community and decided to scrap CAB in favor of a new project called PRISM.
That's the good news. The bad news is that in order to ship according to deadlines, the PRISM team was forced to complete their project without support for WinForms. This wouldn't be so bad if Visual Studio 2008 had decent support for WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), but currently the WPF designer support is severely lacking in Visual Studio. Also, the learning curve for WPF is quite steep for most seasoned WinForms developers.
Brian Noyes to the rescue. Last week, he posted some example code where he begins to port PRISM to WinForms. Here's hoping his Composite Extensions for Windows Forms is just the beginning.
Thanks to Glenn Block for the heads-up!
[UPDATE] Just as I finished this post, James Kovacs posted some new PRISM related content. It seems like the buzz around PRISM is building steadily.
Tags: winforms, prism, cab, compositeui