Prism Template Pack for WPF and Silverlight 4.0

The Prism Template Pack provides Visual Studio 2010 templates to support Prism 4.0 application development on WPF and Silverlight 4.0. Templates are provided for both Visual C# and Visual Basic.NET, and for Unity- and MEF-based development.

You can download the latest version of Prism (version 4.0 - November 2010) from here.

The Prism Template Pack contains project templates that enable you to quickly and easily create Shell and Module projects for both WPF and Silverlight 4.0. It also contains QuickStart Solution templates for Silverlight and WPF. These provide simple multi-module solutions that you can use as the basis for your own Prism applications.

Note: To use the Quick Start Solution templates, you will need to install the Expression Blend SDK for Silverlight (here) and/or WPF (here).

Installing the Prism Template Pack

You can install the Prism Template Pack from the Visual Studio Code Gallery using the Extension Manager, or by downloading the VSIX package directly from here.

Note! You will have to remove the .zip file extension (leaving the .vsix file extension) before double clicking in order to install the templates.

If you have a previous version of the templates installed, they will be automatically updated when you install the new versions of the templates; there is no need to uninstall the previous versions of the templates first.

Once the Template Pack has been installed, it will be displayed it in the Visual Studio 2010 Extension Manager. You can disable or uninstall the Template Pack from here by clicking the appropriate button.

Using the Prism Template Pack

Once the Prism Template Pack has been successfully installed, you will see a Prism category in the Visual Studio 2010 New Project dialog box.

The Prism category contains the Prism templates for Unity and MEF. There are QuickStart, Shell and Module templates for both WPF and Silverlight. The QuickStart Solution templates contain multiple projects. The other templates are single project templates. DoubleClick on a template to quickly create a project based on that template.

Once the project (or solution) has been created, a ReadMe file will be displayed which describes any remaining steps necessary to compile and run the solution. Additional steps are usually only required for Silverlight projects which require you to update the Web project to add Silverlight Application References to the Shell and Module projects.

Prism Assembly References

Prism 4.0 ships with signed pre-built binary assemblies. Once you have installed Prism 4.0, you must register the Prism assemblies with Visual Studio by running the RegisterPrismBinaries.bat batch file. This will ensure that the generated project references will be resolved. If you have not registered the pre-built Prism assemblies, or if you have built the Prism assemblies yourself, you will need to update the project's references to point to the Prism assemblies on your system.

For the latest information on Prism, see www.codeplex.com/prism.