Sunday 27 September 2009

PRISM Documentation: The 'Missing' Table of Contents

For some reason (several actually!) PRISM is largely being ignored by many Silverlight developers. In my talk on PRISM (which I'm repeating at the next meeting of the Silverlight User Group this coming Tuesday - more information here) I talk about the documentation, and the fact that it seems to prejudice people against PRISM, when in fact it's an excellent resource. I talk about the fact there are two ways of looking at it.


PRISM Documentation - half full or half empty?

The 'glass half empty' crowd see how much documentation there is (assuming they can even find it - it's pretty much hidden in a totally inappropriate chm file format by default) and panics that there just isn't enough time to read and understand all this stuff when their Silverlight application needed writing yesterday, and dismiss PRISM as a result.


The 'glass half full' view usually discover the pdf version and realise they're getting a really good full-colour 300+ pdf electronic book with lots of useful advice and guidance for free. For more information on how to get the pdf version see the excellent Downloading and Building PRISM Guide from the folks at Sparkling Client.


One disappointment of the pdf version is that, unlike the traditional e-book, when printed out it doesn't contain a good table of contents. This makes treating it like a book, and finding a specific 'How to', or getting even a basic idea of what's covered in the 'book', is a bit of a nightmare.


I use the documentation a lot, so to avoid wasting time thumbing through my dog-eared copy when I want to look-up something specific, I've put together the 'missing' table of contents as a pdf, which you can download by clicking on the image below. I've taken the liberty of changing some of the "Composite Application Library' headings to instead read 'PRISM' as I think PRISM is pretty schizophrenic with regards to its identity (and think 'Composite Application Library' is too much of a meaningless mouthful). Let me know if I've missed anything!


Download PRISM Table of Contents..

1 comment:

mark mann (SLUGUK) said...

Many thanks for presenting at the Silverlight UK User Group #9 on Tuesday.

I've posted up all the slide decks from the Silverlight UK User Group #9 on my blog here [http://bit.ly/35LhL2]

Mark Mann
[Silverlight UK User Group Organiser]