Silverlight 4: Prism still usable?

Question

Would you still use Prism with SL4, even when Silverlight 4 already supports commanding, e.g. MVVM concept?

Are there features in Prism which can be used and improve design of Silverlight 4 application?

Answer 1

• Modules - to structure the application (with an option of dynamically loading modules when needed
• RegionManager - to deal with assembling UI (layout) from components from different independent modules
• EventAggregator - to deal with cross-module communication (e.g. loosely coupled communication)

Answer 2

On a general note, sticking to the Prism pattern forces an additional level of structure on your Silverlight development. This is especially of benefit to dev teams, more than individuals, as that work can be cleanly partitioned.

The latest Prism 4 went to beta on August 2nd and now adds MEF support (Managed Extensibility Framework) to the other features PL mentions.

MEF is great for building a plug-in based framework. As an example of what it can do the Visual Studio IDE itself uses MEF to implement pretty much everything as a plug-in. Now you can do the same sort of dynamic plugins in Silverlight!

We are currently doing Silverlight Prism development with the previous 2.2. release, but will move over to Prism 4 as soon as it is out of Beta.