One popular gripe about Silverlight has been the lack of integrated testing tools. There are several types of tests you may perform against a software project. Unit tests can be performed with the aid of the Silverlight Unit Testing Framework and automated with a third-party tool such as StatLight. Automation testing involves hosting the actual ...

In my last post, I showed you how to dynamically load modules on demand using the latest MEF release in Silverlight 3. This post, I will take you through managing regions with MEF. This will enable us to have a 100% MEF-based solution in Silverlight 3 if the only pieces of PRISM we were using were the dynamic module loading and region ...

Recently I've been having lots of conversations about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), the Composite Application Library (CAL or PRISM), and how they relate. One point of confusion that many people has comes when they try to force the two solutions to work together. In a recent conversation, I mentioned that PRISM has some great ...

The Silverlight team recently posted a blog entry entitled ''Vancouver Olympics - How'd we do That?'' in which they detailed the massive effort across multiple partners to pull together the on-line solution for streaming HD videos, both live and on demand. This was an exciting post for Wintellect and me because it detailed the effort we ...

PRISM, also known as Composite WPF, has established itself as a very popular framework for building modular, scalable Silverlight applications. A newer contender, the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), has also grown in popularity. In fact, these two frameworks have left people scratching their heads wondering which one to use, when, how, and ...

This post explores how to manage multiple view models across modules in a Prism-based Silverlight application. One powerful feature of Prism is the ability to dynamically load modules. This allows reduction of the XAP file size, as well as encourages a smaller memory footprint as certain modules are not brought into the application until they ...

In yesterday's post about Decoupled ChildWindow Dialogs in Silverlight using Prism, I demonstrated a way to use EventAggregator to decouple the implementation of a dialog from the code that requires the confirmation. In one example, I showed a code-behind click event that fired off the process, something like this: private void ...

A common user interface component is the confirmation or message box, which is often presented as a dialog returns a boolean (OK/Cancel). There are a variety of ways to achieve this, but how can you decouple the implementation of the popup from the request itself? This is necessary, for example, for unit testing when you may not have a UI ...

I recently had the pleasure of speaking at CodeStock 2009 and was very impressed with the conference overall.  The folks behind this conference put in a lot of work and did a really great job.  I got the chance to see some really good presentations as well.  I look forward to attending CodeStock in the future.  The code and ...