How to avoid coupling when using regions in Composite WPF

Question

I have an application designed using Microsoft's Composite Application Library. My shell has several regions defined so that I can inject content from separate modules. I'm looking for a design pattern that will reduce the coupling that these regions introduce.

In all examples I have seen, regions are defined and accessed using a string in a static class in the infrastructure project.:

<ItemsControl cal:RegionManager.RegionName="{x:Static inf:RegionNames.TabRegion}">

public static class RegionNames
{
    public const string TabRegion = "TabRegion";
}

This introduces an dependency on the shell from the infrastructure project, because part of the infrastructure project must now match the shell. The CAL RegionManager throws an exception if you attempt to access a region which is not defined, so I must ensure that the infrastructure and shell projects are kept in sync.

Is there a way to isolate the shell's regions so that they are defined only within the shell (no region names in the infrastructure project)?

Is there a way to make regions optional, so that shells can be swapped out even if they don't have all the same regions? (An example: One shell has menu and toolbar regions, another only has the menu... modules should be able to inject into the toolbar if it's available, without failing when it's not)

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Update - More details on my architecture

In response to depictureboy's answer below, I wanted to describe the way my system is set up... perhaps there will be more good feedback on it.

I am treating the Infrastructure and Shell projects as generic libraries, and I have several applications which use them. The Infrastructure project provides "framework" code and resources (like MVVM stuff, reflection, icons), and my Shell is a generic host window, with the basic window layout (menus, toolbars, status bar, main content area). The applications all share a common look and behave similarly because they share the shell.

My applications get their individual functionality from the modules which get loaded, so I have a bootstrapper project per application which pulls everything together (infra, shell, modules).

I imagine if I ever need to develop a brand new application that is very different from the current ones, I will be able to re-use the infrastructure project, but not the shell. That is why I am curious about decoupling the infrastructure project and the shell.

Answer 1

I think you have your logic backwards. Your shell is the glue that binds everything together. In my mind you want the infrastructure and shell tightly coupled because they are the application. Your modules are the parts of the application that will be changing and switching around dynamically. You want your shell regions to be static so that, for example, another developer could write a module for your application knowing where his different views were going to be placed and how the application should behave with his module attached. The Infrastructure project is there to be the go between between your shell and its modules...thats just a fact of life at least in my book. One of the WPF gurus may come up with something that absolutely blows that out of the water tomorrow....