Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - Posts

• CSLA Light preview release

  I have put a very early preview release of CSLA Light and CSLA .NET 3.6 online at www.lhotka.net/cslalight/download.aspx . There is no sample app at this point, so you'll have to look at the unit tests in cslalighttest and cslatest to figure out how to use the various features. Obviously this is very early code, but it is healthy to release early and often, so here we go :) One side-effect of our work with CSLA Light is that we discovered that testing asynchronous methods is really hard with nunit and MSTest, and impossible with the Silverlight unit test framework provided by Microsoft. And yet in Silverlight, async methods are commonly required, and for parity a number of async features are now also in CSLA .NET. And we need to have unit tests for them. To address this issue, we ended up creating our own Silverlight unit testing framework, and an add-on framework for nunit or MSTest. This allows us to write a common set of test code that runs in both Silverlight and .NET so we can test both, and establish that we have parity between them. Earier today, Justin split this testing framework out of CSLA and we put it up on CodePlex, calling it UnitDriven . The CSLA Light project and Magenic are donating the code to the community as an open-source project, because it can be used to build async unit tests for any app, not just for CSLA Light. Read More... Posted Tuesday, July 15, 2008 8:40 PM from Rockford Lhotka | 0 Comments Filed under: CSLA .NET, Silverlight

• Expert 2008 Business Objects tentative TOC

  I get a lot of questions about Expert 2008 Business Objects as to what it will and won't cover, so I thought I'd try and answer at least some of them in a blog post. The book will cover CSLA .NET 3.6. Version 3.6 is the same as 3.5, but with support for CSLA Light and some .NET 3.5 SP1 features (such as the Entity Framework). And along with CSLA Light comes some interesting support for things like an async data portal and async validation rules. But please note that this book will not cover CSLA Light - that's a book by itself, believe me! Here's the tentative table of contents for the book: 1. Architecture 2. Design 3. Object-oriented design 4. Supported stereotypes 5. Stereotype templates 6. Framework Implementation 7. Editable Objects and Collections 8. Data Binding 9. Business and Validation Rules 10. Authorization Rules 11. N-level Undo 12. LINQ to CSLA 13. Persistence and the Data Portal 14. Example Business Library 15. WPF Application 16. Web Forms Application 17. WCF Service Application > The items in green are complete - first draft anyway - and so you can get an idea where I am in the process. Due to space and time constraints, this book will have three UI chapters just like the previous books. So I had to choose which interface technologies to cover - out of the myriad options available: WPF WPF/XBAP Windows Forms asmx services WCF services WF workflows and activities ASP.NET Web Forms ASP.NET MVC Office/VSTO (Word, Excel, etc) Console I want to make sure to cover smart clients, web development and services. While WCF and Web Forms were easy choices (though I do like ASP.NET MVC a lot, it isn't mainstream yet), the choice between Windows Forms and WPF was difficult. But I have to give WPF the nod, because it is a really nice technology, and it really shows off the power of CSLA .NET business objects very nicely. My current plan is to release ebooks that specifically focus on each of the interface technologies not covered in Expert 2008 Business Objects , and some sort of book (ebook or traditional) covering CSLA Light. Read More... Posted Tuesday, July 15, 2008 11:17 AM from Rockford Lhotka | 0 Comments Filed under: Books, CSLA .NET