CSLA Site/Forum suggestion

Jack posted on Friday, February 06, 2009

Does anybody else feel that a Wikipedia or a glossary might be of use online? I spend hours scrounging through the forums, the ebooks, and stepping through code and it is all very overwhelming.

I'm a pretty smart guy but a lot of this framework business is pretty nitty gritty details and given I need to be a subject matter expert on all my clients business, manage all my database work, manage my own business & time, etc. I'm looking for all the resources possible in the most streamlined manner.

Outside of all the design methodologies and theories there is a lot of misuse/shorthand/etc of pure CSLA terms and notation in the forums. I think it would be an excellent idea to have some online documentation that can grow over time. The e-books are great but obviously they are static and with rapid changes for Silverlight and other new requirements the changes are coming fast and furious.

Given the forums and the excellent responses are my sole resource it would be nice to optimize the experience.

Just as an example the whole concept of managed fields, managed properties, backed fields, private backed managed properties etc seems to be misused (at least by me).

A lot of the help I find is from people that keep a running thread and update it with their fixes. Maybe a pre-organized place to do that would be helpful?

Just a thought...

jack

RockfordLhotka replied on Friday, February 06, 2009

I set up a wiki for this purpose some years ago. A few people posted a few things, but mostly it was very dead - until the spammers found it and killed my entire server. So I disabled the wiki.

The idea is a good one, and a bad one.

It is a good one, in that if people really did put in the effort to build content it would be useful.

It is a bad one, in that the only way CSLA is funded is through sales of my books and ebooks. So a really robust set of online materials would almost certainly undercut the funding for the framework, making it more difficult for me to justify the time I put into it.

It is a quandry - but not one I'm overly worried about, since the wiki experiment was pretty unsuccessful overall.

Jack replied on Saturday, February 07, 2009

Perfectly legit and understandable – as soon as your Silverlight Express eBook is ready let me know J

From: RockfordLhotka [mailto:cslanet@lhotka.net]
Sent: February-06-09 10:15 PM
To: jaddington@alexandergracie.com
Subject: Re: [CSLA .NET] CSLA Site/Forum suggestion

I set up a wiki for this purpose some years ago. A few people posted a few things, but mostly it was very dead - until the spammers found it and killed my entire server. So I disabled the wiki.

The idea is a good one, and a bad one.

It is a good one, in that if people really did put in the effort to build content it would be useful.

It is a quandry - but not one I'm overly worried about, since the wiki experiment was pretty unsuccessful overall.

sroberts replied on Saturday, February 07, 2009

Rocky,

I fully understand your position regarding re-numeration given the maturity of CSLA and your dedication to the community. (I can't remeber the last time I posted on a Microsoft Newsgroup and got an answer the same days from the developer of the software itself ! Smile [:)]

)

However I'm curious as to whether a couple of up-to-date FAQ's would help improve the situation for both yourself and the community, the FAQ's wouldn't negate the need for the books and would only serve to do what the forum's do anyway. The added benefit I see would be that the re-curring questions or themes could be addressed and hopefully reduce your forum support burden with more time for R&D.....I mean more time with your family... Smile [:)]

)

By the way, as an aside, the default filter for the current FAQ forum only shows posts newer than 2 months (which means you currently get a 'Oops! There are either no posts or due to a filter there are no posts to display.'). Perhaps this should be set to automatically show all posts ?

RockfordLhotka replied on Sunday, February 08, 2009

Yeah, the use of the forum for a FAQ list didn’t work well. The idea was that other people could maintain the FAQ – and that part is good. But the forum software doesn’t have a way to override the filter so the posts are always visible L

I’m open to revisiting the FAQ idea where a limited number of motivated people maintain the FAQ. But I think I’d do it by setting up a location on www.lhotka.net (probably with a read-only wiki) so the FAQ team could edit the content, the world could see the content and spammers couldn’t mess it up.

Rocky

Jack replied on Thursday, February 12, 2009

It would be nice if there was a way for the general population to submit ideas/questions for examples, clarification, etc and maybe vote on the suggestions without solutions or examples so that the FAQ team had a good idea on where to focus their attention.

Even something as simple as RegisterProperty - there are umpteen ways to do it, there are restrictions for Silverlight, etc. Maybe more blog/rss oriented with the ability to add comments if you are a registered /w the forum. Obviously limiting it so that it can't be overwhelmed by spammers etc.

RockfordLhotka replied on Thursday, February 12, 2009

I have set up another wiki - this one uses far simpler software, and doesn't allow public authoring, so hopefully spam won't become an issue.

www.lhotka.net/cslanet/faq

What is needed now are people willing to create and maintain the content - and probably provide some organizational scheme.

You'll notice that I organized things a little, but already it is clear that further subdivision (and consolidation) is probably required to make the information useful.

Of course a ton of existing content exists on www.lhotka.net, and I surely don't want to duplicate that. So one important element will be to identify and link to existing content whereever possible, and to only create new content if necessary.