A question we get asked frequently is: “How do I start learning Prism? Is there a particular order for the Quickstarts? What other web resources do you recommend to start learning?”. If you are in this situation, or just want to have some more insight on a particular Prism topic, this is the post for you (I always wanted to say that, just like TV announcements :))
The basic question: “How do I start learning Prism?”
The first thing you should do to start learning Prism (assuming you know WPF/Silverlight), is begin with the documentation. It is really clear in what it tries to explain, provides great samples and explains a lot of the common doubts when starting to develop applications with Prism. There is not a particular order to learn Prism, so you should tackle it in the way you feel comfortable. Pay special attention to the Technical Concepts section, as it really helps understand how things come together.
| Tip 1: Read the Prism documentation. |
If while reading the documentation you have any doubts, or want to dig deeper into any particular topic you have many different options (and search queries in your favorite search engine). However, there are some things I believe you should take a look at:
- Prism KB. There you will find links on many different topics (you can find a picture of them below), that could be videos, sample applications or blog post which will help you better understand some of Prism concepts.
- Watch videos. There are lots of video tutorials going around, but these two collections are particularly good. Videos from P&P team & 10 Things to Know About Silverlight Prism.
| Tip 2: Use the Prism KB and watch videos (these and also these particularly). |
Prism KB site
But, what if I have some doubts while learning?
That is why developer communities were created, and as any other p&p asset Prism has its own forum at Codeplex where you can ask questions about any topic (technical concepts, how do I?, etc). The forum has a really active community, and is also monitored by the p&p Client Sustained Engineering Team (which we are part of). So if you have a question that has been bugging you for some time, and have not found the answer anywhere you can always drop by the forum.
| Tip 3: Ask questions in the Prism Codeplex forum. |
Last, but definitely not least…
There are some frequent Prism bloggers that you should follow, as they have some really interesting posts about how to use Prism and its insides. Below I will provide the list of those I follow (which is probably really short in comparison to the one I should be following), and for some the most interesting/requested post in my opinion:
- Blaine’s, Bob’s and David’s blogs, with the latest news about Prism future.
- Erwin’s blog. He has a really interesting series about working with MVVM.
- Ward Bell. He has some really interesting posts, but the ones I choose are: Birth and Death of M-V-VM Triads & Prism Event Aggregator Subscription Blues.
- Southworks blogs: Julian, Ezequiel, Mariano, Matias. The post that is a MUST is Julian’s ICommand For Silverlight with Attached Behaviors.
- Glenn’s post: The spirit of MVVM (ViewModel), it’s not a code counting exercise, as this is something we get asked a lot and I share his thoughts on this topic.
As an extra, you can also follow the clientdev twitter, in which we tweet about the latest news about different .Net Client Development technologies (mostly Silverlight & WPF) and can be really useful when learning about Prism.
| Tip 4: Read tons of articles about Prism. |
I hope this article will help your Prism learning process, and please provide any feedback you might have so I can improve this guidance, like comments on the bloggers.
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