A few days ago, Microsoft's PAG group released some new documentation for their Composite UI Application blocks.  To review this, get latest releases of the codebase and other up-to-the-minute releases, you will need to register for the GotDotNet workspace.  However, the codebase as well as a quick-start lab are available in Microsoft downloads (VB.NET is available as well as C#). 

This documentation release is designed to give beginners to the CAB codebase an introduction to key concepts used in the blocks.  The blocks are built on .NET 2.0, and one of the main reasons to use them is that they provide a framework for building smart client applications that are composed of independant modules that can be worked on independantly and released independantly that all run within a sophisticated shell framework.  The design goals for the CAB blocks were modularity and extensibility.  With the design being put forth by the Patterns and Practices group, one of the benefits is that there is an excellent amount of thought and architecture design that centers around some of the more interesting recent design patterns, such as Inversion of Control or Dependency Injection, Service Locaters, and Builder patterns.  So if you want to learn some design pattern concepts by looking at a real implementation and reading code (by far the best way in my opinion!!), this is a good candidate.

I was reminded of this work by the documentation release, combined with the timing I had of needing to do a major re-write of a forms client I have hanging out in the archives of my server.   When the CAB blocks came out in December 2005, I downloaded it and played around with the concepts, but didn't take it much farther.  Now, opportunity being the driving force, and with a good candidate for refactoring into the CAB framework, I'm off on a new adventure!!!!