Playing with Prism 4

We're at the end of this project I've been working on for some time now. As per usual, we kind of got into this fire drill situation of trying to get everything all wrapped up at the end. So things like trying to implement acceptance testing got pushed aside in favor of squashing all these bugs that popped up precisely because we didn't implement acceptance testing in the first place. That is all for another series of blog posts altogether I think.

Anyway, also as per usual we got to the end of this project and came to the realization that the architecture of the project was deficient to begin with. I don't mean to say that this just dawned on us. I mean I think we knew before that the architecture was deficient. I mean "realization" in the sense that the problem "manifested" (perhaps a better word) itself at the end. The core components of the application are a WPF client that interfaces with a web service as well as a windows service which handles data loading. The web service can interface with the windows service to report back to the client when loading occurs. Both services are WCF services, and we could probably improve on their architecture to an extent, but that was a bullet we bit about halfway through the project. At that time we made some significant changes to the service side, so while there are definitely some changes we could make, the architecture is ok.

On the client side though we ran into issues. The client-side architecture is a bastardization of one we used on a previous project. That project used the Composite Application Library and an MVP architecture. It was a big, complex application. We thought we could scale that down and cut out some things we wouldn't really need. It turned into sort of an ugly bastard child in every sense of the word.

So, after the fact (which is totally the way I LOVE to do things), I am looking at Prism 4, seeing how it improves I what we did with CAL and figuring out how we can use it for the second release of this project, which we'll probably start after the Holidays. So what follows in the next few episodes are my rambling thoughts as I experiment with Prism and WPF and reassembling pieces of the existing client into something that I don't want to throw out a window.