Time to upgrade

jhw posted on Thursday, March 29, 2007

I still use csla 1.x and visual studio 2003. I am way overdue to upgrade. Already have the new csla 2.x book but now I need to upgrade visual studio. Google says they are about to release 2007. Does anyone know when it will be out as I hate to upgrade to 2005 if 2007 if right around the corner.

It doesn't sound like there will be much difference, so does that mean that there should be no big changes to csla. Upgrading my projects is just soooo much work and I hate to go to versions that are about to be obsolete.

Thanks.

ajj3085 replied on Thursday, March 29, 2007

I would definately get software assurance that would let you upgrade to 2007 when its out.

2007 simply lets you target .net 3, which includes WPF, WCF etc.  So you'll have the tools built in.  There are extensions to VS2005 for this, but I'm not sure if they will get any more updating..

I've played with WPF a bit, and its quite powerful for creating very cool interfaces.  One of the things I like the most is that you can pretty much embed any control into any other control... so its easy to make a drop down that includings a mixutre of pictures, movies, text, other controls, etc.   That alone I think will be worth the investment to learn WPF, because I always feel limited by the Forms controls.. and I either have to spend lots of time building my own controls from scratch, or paying a bunch of money for prebuilt controls.

As far as Csla goes, there's some work that needs to be done to add WCF as a data portal channel, and other components to support data binding in WPF.  But I have a feeling that it will be much easier to move from Csla 2.1.4 to 3 than from 1.1 to 2.1.4.. so I would go for it.

Andy

jhw replied on Thursday, March 29, 2007

Thanks Andy

I see that the msdn 2005 pro subscription includes the new 'orcas' (2007) edtition of visual studio. Looks like that is the way to go.