Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Announcing Jounce 1.0 RTM - It's here!

Jounce is the result of building composite Silverlight enterprise applications for a variety of verticals since Silverlight 3.0 and finding the common problems that needed to be solved. I found many frameworks to be too heavy for the task and always wondered why more did not tap into the native advantages that the Managed Extensibility Framework brings. So, I began porting my framework around as a core engine for projects and finally decided to make it available to provide guidance for building these types of applications using the MVVM pattern and MEF.

You can see concepts about Jounce echoed in many of my posts, but the easiest way to summarize the post-release topics is to follow the jounce tag on this blog. While bits and pieces have been posted over time, probably the first comprehensive peek at what Jounce would look like happened as the result of my 2010 CodeStock presentation. I posted an application called XFit to demo a live modular application that was more than just a button and a text file. Over time that has been refined and advanced through input from the community as well as fellow developers who are using Jounce in their own projects.

I'd like to give special thanks to Page Brooks for giving Jounce a logo, adding tests, testing the heck out of it and also giving us a wonderful project template (available on the downloads page).

Anyway I hope this guidance finds you well, and provides a nice, lightweight set of examples and patterns for building Silverlight applications with the MVVM pattern and MEF. Go ahead and grab the source, read the docs, and join the discussions at the Jounce CodePlex site. Thanks!

Jeremy Likness