Comments on C#er : IMage: MEF instead of PRISM for Silverlight 3 Part 1 of 2...

Probably a great article, but also of great comple...

2010-11-16T06:00:47.313-05:00

Probably a great article, but also of great complexity of code.

Most likely the target audience of this article are people, who came through some of the Prism & MEF joined together in one project scenarios. Unfortunately this isn't the case for me and although I know the basics of MVVM, Commanding, Dependency Properties etc. and have successfully used Prism for separation purposes (Regions, EventAggregator) it's extremly hard to follow this particular article with just seven months of professional experience, all in the .NET area. (I'm sure even developers with a few years of professional experience may not understand everything described in this article, this is a compliment)

MEF itself is surprisingly straightforward, so it would be great to use it (with region management, and module loading) instead.

Any tips for mastering these two articles for the fewer experienced minds?

I guess my best answer for you is this: you alread...

2010-08-03T16:37:45.229-04:00

I guess my best answer for you is this: you already have DeploymentCatalog for dynamically loading the XAP files, so why are you using the PRISM modules as well? What advantage is that giving you? Seems it adds a layer of indirection and complexity that you don't need.

Hi Jeremy, great articles covering SL, MEF and dyn...

2010-07-29T00:29:14.480-04:00

Hi Jeremy, great articles covering SL, MEF and dynamic module loading.

I am very interesting to know how to share the MEF/PRISM libraies between the main SL app and all other modules.

Using ModularityWithMef.Silverlight (Prism drop 4) as an example. ModularityWithMef.Silverlight, ModuleA,ModuleB,..ModuleD are all referencing to Composite.MefExtensions.Silverlight and Composite.Silverlight.

I can't set Copy Local to false, or will get assembly not found exception.

I don't like to have them in each XAP file, so I am trying to make a zip file for each of them, like Visual Studio does for some other system assembly, however, it doesn't work.

I am thinking to keep them in ModularityWithMef.Silverlight.xap, but remove them from all other modules xap, not working either.

So far, what I can do is to create a new SL App, with a dummy module, and add referenc to these dlls, modify ModulesCatalog so to make other Modules depends on this dummy module. With this approache, those dlls only live in ModularityWithMef.Silverlight and this new SL App, instead of within every xap.

Is there any better solution?

Thanks

Chang

Any chance this article and example code could be ...

2010-07-22T20:13:12.189-04:00

Any chance this article and example code could be updated to VS10/SL4? Thanks!

Yes. I'm not a big fan of inherited export ......

2010-05-20T22:40:42.904-04:00

Yes. I'm not a big fan of inherited export ... for classes specifically created for that behavior, great, but I like a little more control.

For example, I'm often exporting UserControl and other types. I can't "inherited export" because I don't have access to the base class and I don't believe in creating interfaces just to identify things, so it's much more practical to use export. I'd like to be consistent and use that throughout, instead of having some "inherited" and others explicitly exported.

Jeremy, you have marked classes with the Export at...

2010-05-20T18:12:13.193-04:00

Jeremy, you have marked classes with the Export attribute like this:

public interface IModuleInitializer {
...
}

[Export(typeof(IModuleInitializer))]
public class ModuleInitializer : IModuleInitializer {
...
}

Is there a reason you don't use the InheritedExport attribute on interface?

private read-only AggregateCatalog readonly ! :p ...

2010-05-11T03:52:01.851-04:00

private read-only AggregateCatalog
readonly ! :p

I 've finished this ! It was not very difficult, i have had a problem on ShellViewModel : when i was clicking on the first button, it became enable.false but the second button was still enable.False. A look to your solution learn me that i was missing something in the constructor.

If i'm not wrong, you don't include the tips of Glenn Block. Does it change something ?

Thank you so much ! Now let's take a look to the part 2/2 ! :D

I just want to ssay that if we don't download ...

2010-05-10T08:48:13.086-04:00

I just want to ssay that if we don't download the source and try to repeat what we read, you don't say anything about creating new project (the common project)

Ok we could find with the reference in the xaml but if you want your article to be understood by almost developper (even the newbie one like me :) it could be good to mention such things.

But it's still an amazing article ;)

Amazing article ! i found your link on silverlight...

2010-05-10T05:48:46.416-04:00

Amazing article ! i found your link on silverlight.net

Now that i've read, i'm going to try it :D

It's something I know I will need to do when t...

2010-04-23T07:01:02.476-04:00

It's something I know I will need to do when the time comes available. Thanks!

Can you perhaps adapt the source for Silverlight 4...

2010-04-23T06:28:50.094-04:00

Can you perhaps adapt the source for Silverlight 4? There seems to be a few changes that makes your source not compile. Thanks for this by the way. :)

The code that uses AggregateCatalog instead of Dep...

2010-03-29T03:45:04.292-04:00

The code that uses AggregateCatalog instead of DeploymentCatalog is still very useful. DeploymentCatalog has a problem: when instantiated, it will load upfront ALL the assemblies in the XAP file, inclusing the System.*, Microsoft.*, et al, and this slows down the application start. But using the AggregateCatalog, you can easily make only your own assemblies to be added to the catalog, for example filtering by assembly name. Using this idea, I use your code this modification, and it is very useful:

foreach (AssemblyPart ap in Deployment.Current.Parts.Where(part => part.Source.StartsWith("MyCompany.")))

Awesome post! I am looking forward to the region ...

2010-02-26T19:31:18.008-05:00

Awesome post! I am looking forward to the region managment post.