Project Silk from patterns & practices provides guidance for building cross-browser Web applications with a focus on client-side interactivity. These applications take advantage of the latest Web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript 5 along with modern Web technologies such as jQuery, Internet Explorer 9 and ASP.NET MVC3.

To illustrate this guidance, the project includes a reference implementation called Mileage Stats that enables its users to track various metrics about their vehicles and fill-ups. Much of the effort in building Mileage Stats was applied to the usability and interactivity of the experience. Animations were included to enhance the enjoyment of the site and Ajax is used to keep the interface responsive and immersive. A great deal of care was also taken to ensure the client-side JavaScript facilitates modularity and maintainability. To accomplish these design goals, the JavaScript code was structured into “widgets” that benefit from the jQuery UI Widget Factory.

Latest Drops

The Documentation Drop can be downloaded here: http://silk.codeplex.com/releases/view/66995. Documentation is in both pdf and chm formats.

The latest code drop (Drop 9, 10 May 2011) can be downloaded here: http://silk.codeplex.com/releases/view/66045

The following chapters are ready for community review:

· Architecture

· jQuery UI Widgets

· Server-Side Implementation

· Security

· Unit Testing Web Applications

· Widget QuickStart (updated)

· How to: Check UIElement Properties with Coded UI Test

· How to: Create Automation Negative case with Coded UI Test

· How to: Create Web Client Test Automation with Coded UI Test

Project Silk’s Details view is shown below.  A HD video of the running application can be viewed here: http://www.vimeo.com/22980548

Last fall the Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices team shipped Prism 4, now you can get the companion book.

The “Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Prism 4” book.

You can get the book at O’Reilly or Amazon [ Click HERE ].

The eBook will be available for download shortly.

The MSDN online content is available [ HERE ].

What’s In The Book ?  - Here’s the official blurb.

Prism helps you to design and build flexible and maintainable WPF and Silverlight applications by using design patterns that support important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling.

This guide will show you how to use Prism to implement the Model-View-ViewModel pattern in your applications, and how to use it along with commands and interaction requests to encapsulate application logic and make it testable.

It will show you how to split an application into separate functional modules that can communicate through loosely coupled events, and how to integrate those modules into the overall application.

It will show you how to dynamically construct a flexible user interface by using regions, and how to implement rich navigation across a modular application.

Reference Library and Code Samples

Accompanying the book are reference implementations and QuickStarts in C# and Visual Basic that can be downloaded from MSDN:

• Prism 4 (includes Prism 4 source code, binaries, documentation in CHM format,
  Reference Implementations, QuickStarts, and Hands-on Labs in C#)
• Prism 4 Visual Basic Assets (includes Reference Implementations, QuickStarts, and
  Hands-on Labs)

To learn more about Prism, see the following:

• Prism Read Me (includes installation instructions)
• Introduction

You might also be interested in this : MVVM Training

To provide feedback or to get help, please visit the Prism Community Site at http://www.codeplex.com/prism.