WPF UI composition without Prism

Question

Hi,

Are there any alternatives to Prism for UI composition (region management etc.)?

Thank you.

Answer 1

There are a few ways, but the one that is all the rage these days is MEF. This series of posts is about Silverlight UI composition, but the techniques are essentially the same (aside from packaging and deployment): http://codebetter.com/blogs/glenn.block/archive/tags/HelloMEF/default.aspx

The only thing you won't get by using exclusively MEF is the Pub/Sub communication technology in Prism called "EventAggregator", but this can be easily substituted by using EventAggregator itself (it is standalone... you don't have to adopt all of Prism to use just that) or you can use another implementation of event brokering, like the Messenger in MVVM Foundation (http://mvvmfoundation.codeplex.com).

There are also quite a few people using a mix of MEF and Prism, so you might check that out as well.