Look for a good summary of technologies and / or frameworks for Silverlight / .NET

Question

I’m only now delving into the world of Silverlight. I can do a lot, but I try to do the "hard way"; writing heaps of custom code and more. Sometimes I come across technologies or frameworks that make me hit my head and die a little inside, because they do exactly what I do and can be done in minutes, not hours.

A good example of this is the MEF (Managed Extension Framework). This took over my complex "plugins" mechanism, which I created in Silverlight, and welded it into a few simple steps. It's great.

My question is: where can I find a good resource that simply provides a list of relevant topics for the topic (e.g. silverlight) and a brief description of what the technology / structure is, and perhaps how it can be used? I'm not interested in the details, I can see them anywhere. I just want to know what is available to me. In other words, what tools can I use to quickly create code faster?

Only this brief information about significant technologies (to the topic, of course .... subjective is significant) can save people so much time.

Is there a resource like this?

Answer 1

Take a look at Prism from the Templates & Practices group at Microsoft. This is a compilation of documentation, best practice tips, and code libraries that make life easier for managers inversion architecture such as MEF. It also talks about the MVVM pattern and other patterns.

For example, one problem when working with MEF is how do you get two separate modules to talk to each other or respond to the same events? Prism has an event aggregator service that allows individual modules to subscribe to events or publish them without knowing who is on the other end of the connection.