Prism 4.0

With the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010 and .Net 4.0, naturally my thoughts went to the future of Prism. The Simplifying patterns & practices blog posted an entry of what is in store.

Prism, A Look Ahead

Of all the listed focus items for the Prism update, I’m excited about MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) the most. I would like to use MEF directly as well in my ERP Framework, Orchestra, and it all fits perfectly with Prism using it as well.

The only downside is that the planned release of Prism 4.0 is September, 2010. It will be a 6 month wait, so what do I do in the meantime? I will probably focus in getting ProtoStack launched first, being independent of Prism. For Orchestra, sitting on top of ProtoStack, I think I will also be working on the business layer first, looking at the best way to structure the foundations of the financial, sales and inventory modules, keeping them loosely coupled to allow MEF to be the glue between them later on.

That also means I will only have postpone any work on Orchestra’s presentation layer until Prism 4.0’s launch, instead using very simple UI prototypes to test the underlying business layer.

I’m also considering targeting the ERP framework to be presented in both ASP.NET MVC and Silverlight.

(As an aside, there is also a new .Net 4.0 poster now. It’s a welcome addition to my list of free posters in a previous post. http://download.microsoft.com/download/E/6/A/E6A8A715-7695-493C-8CFA-8E0C23A4BE1D/098-115952-NETFX4-Poster.pdf)