What's New In Prism 5.0?

Are you WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone developer and used Microsoft’s patterns and practices library to build your applications? If you are, then you might want to know that Microsoft’s patterns and practices team have just released Prism 5.0. All the applications built using the previous versions of Prism are now broken. So, in this artifact, I’ll be discussing about the new assemblies, new objects and deprecated objects which can/can’t be used with Prism 4.1 and Prism 5.0.

Downloading Prism 5.0

Prism 5.0 can be downloaded and installed either from patterns and practices site having URL as http://compositewpf.codeplex.com/ or by using Nuget package inside Visual Studio. Mentioned link also discusses about all the changes which are part of Prism 5.0

Supported Platforms

Let’s have a quick look at the supported platforms of Prism 5.0. While working with previous versions of Prism (i.e. 4.1), one was able to create applications like WPF (.Net 4.0), Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone (7.5). Point to note here is, Prism 5.0 only supports WPF (.Net 4.5).

Prism 4.1	Prism 5.0
WPF (.Net 4.0)	WPF(.Net 4.5)
Silverlight 5
Windows Phone (7.5)

 

In other words, if your application is written in Silverlight or Windows Phone and you are planning to upgrade to Prism 5.0, then it’s not going to work. In this case, either you have to use some tool and make your application as WPF application (if possible) or simply stick to the existing version of Prism.

Assembly Changes

This section discusses about all the assembly related changes that Prism 5.0 introduces. Please note, in below table all the assemblies are prefixed with Microsoft.Practices:

Prism 4.1	Prism 5.0
Prism	Prism.Composition [Renamed]
Prism.Interactivity	Prism.Interactivity [No change here]
ServiceLocation	ServiceLocation [No change here]
Unity	Unity [It is now a PCL]
Prism.UnityExtensions/Mef	Prism.UnityExtensions
	Prism.SharedInterfaces [Is is also a PCL]
	Prism.MVVM [It is also a PCL]
	Prism.MVVM.Desktop
	Prism.PubSubEvents [It is also a PCL]

If you will see above table, the assembly named Microsoft.Practices.Prism in Prism 4.1 is no longer called Microsoft.Practices.Prism in Prism 5.0. Now this assembly is renamed to Prism.Composition.

There is no change in Prism.Interactivity, ServiceLocation, Prism.UnityExtensions and Prism.MefExtensions front.

This Prism.Composition takes dependency on another new assembly called Prism.SharedInterfaces, which is a PCL (Portable Class Library).

On MVVM front, there are two more additions. One is Prism.MVVM which is again a PCL and shares a common MVVM functionality across Windows Store Apps and Windows Presentation Foundation applications. Now to get around of few limitations and some needed enhancements on WPF, a separate assembly is created having name as Prism.MVVM.Desktop, which is specifically meant to be used on desktop.

One more addition is Prism.PubSubEvents. This is event aggregator. So, event aggregator is called out of Prism and has been kept into its own PCL library in Prism 5.0

Deprecated Objects

Deprecated objects are the objects which are still in assemblies but we just don’t want to use them anymore and if you are currently using them, then you have to move them to different object instance. Below is the list of such objects:

Object	Use
NotificationObject	Microsoft.Practices.Prism.MVVM.BindableBase class in Microsoft.Practices.Prism.MVVM.dll
PropertySupport	Microsoft.Practices.Prism.MVVM.PropertySupport class in Microsoft.Practices.Prism.MVVM.dll
CompositePresentationEvent	Microsoft.Practices.Prism.PubSubEvents.PubSubEvent class in Microsoft.Practices.Prism.PubSubEvents.dll

Objects moved to new location

There are few objects which are given the new home in Prism 5.0. If you are using any of the below mentioned objects, then you have to re-reference your assemblies with the new ones. Apart from assemblies, namespace is also changed. Please note, below mentioned changes are the breaking changes.

Object	New Location
DelegateCommand CompositeCommand PropertySupport ErrorsContainer	Microsoft.Practices.Prism.MVVM in Microsoft.Practices.Prism.MVVM.dll
IActiveAware	Microsoft.Practices.Prism.SharedInterfaces.dll
CommandBehaviorBase	Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Interactivity in Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Interactivity.dll

Removed Objects

There are few objects in Prism 4.1, which are completely removed from Prism 5.0. This section discusses about the objects that are completely gone. This is again considered as a breaking change.

Object	Use
ButtonBaseClickCommandBehavior Click	Marked as obsolete in Prism 4.1
UriQuery	Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Regions.NavigationParameters in Microsoft.Practices.Prism.Composition.dll

Apart from all these changes, few changes are made to Quick Starts and help files also.