Design Patterns in PRISM

Question

I'm in some sort of confusion: at one hand Microsoft architects and surrounding web community promote MVVM pattern for building WPF apps, but from the other hand in Prism patterns and practices they uses absolutely other design patterns - MVP, Presentation Model and Supervising Controller! And not a single example of use pure MVVM! They even say nothing about using MVVM in their PRISM documentation! So, what should one do in this situation? Is it possible to use MVVM pattern in PRISM applications with the same level of freedom as with patterns listed above? I mean would it be more complex or not because of (probably) kind a native architectural optimization for these patterns?

Answer 1

Absolutely. PRISM glues the parts of your composite application together, but those parts may use MVVM or whatever pattern you prefer (as can your Shell).

Answer 2

You can definitely use MVVM with Prism.

Blaine Wastell from the Patterns and Practices group has said that the next version of Prism (v4) will contain more help for the MVVM pattern. I've read somewhere else that this means better support for MVVM in Blend, and more MVVM in the documentation.

http://blogs.msdn.com/blaine/archive/2010/01/15/prism-4-0.aspx