I have been away from CSLA for a while now. I used it when it was just upgrading to version 2. So I need to come up to speed on the newest version of CSLA. Currently, I have a two-year project I have to do that is made up of many steps. I wanted to use CSLA 3.5 with VS 2008 so that when I finish the last step I will be as up to date on technology as possible; but as I read through the forums, it seems that a new book will not be out till after June of 2008 or longer because of the hectic schedule Rocky has. In addition to myself, I have 3 other programmers that need to learn the technology from scratch. I did see that the 3.5 framework was available for download.
So my question is; is there a viable path to come up to speed on CSLA 3.5 right now? If so, what is it.
I realize that most likely any answer given will be an opinion, but I value an educated opinion over a guess. Thanks in advance.
The 3.5 framework is not available yet - what's there is just preview code. I expect a beta release around the end of January. If I miss that, it'll be mid-Feb, as I'm full-time at a client (and traveling) for three weeks and won't get any serious framework work done during that time.
When talking about 3.5 there are two aspects to consider.
First, is .NET 3.5 support. It turns out that nothing in CSLA 3.5 is required for .NET 3.5. In other words, we're adding some nice features, but nothing that is absolutely cirtical. LINQ just doesn't have that big an impact.
This means that you can use 3.0.4 with .NET 3.5 and things will be just fine. The only thing you might want/need to do is back-port Csla.Data.ContextManager to make it easier to deal with LINQ data context objects.
Second are all the code-reduction features I'm doing in CSLA for 3.5. This is a much bigger deal, because it affects CSLA itself quite a lot, and because it means you can write around 35% less code per business class in many (most) cases. While this could technically be back-ported, it would be a lot of work because the changes are so extensive.
ProjectTracker.Library should offer a pretty good guide around these changes though. Mostly they simplify code and reduce the amount of knowledge required to build business objects with CSLA .NET.
Thanks for clearing that up a bit. ok we will look at CSLA 3.0.4 for are starting place.
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