Am confused by multiple CSLA versions

david.wendelken posted on Friday, September 18, 2009

I've been off working in Oracle/Java land, so I haven't been keeping up with .net and csla for the last year and a half.

Naturally, I headed here to get the latest csla for my first .net project after getting back! :)

But there seem to be different versions of CSLA to choose from, and I'm confused.

One, I'm not necessarily wanting to do silverlight, so CSLA for Silverlight doesn't seem the right choice.

Which version of CSLA do we use for .net web and windows application development? 

The different CSLA versions for different front ends is a bit confusing, as I thought one of the design goals was to have the same business object code support multiple front ends...

JonnyBee replied on Friday, September 18, 2009

Hi Dave,

Decide on what version of .Net  to support and select the newest version of Csla for that runtime.

Csla 3.7.0 is the latest and recommended release for .Net 3.5 and includes helpers for Windows Forms, ASP.NET, WPF and Silverlight.

And I would also recommend to upgrade your projects as soon as new versions are released.

Csla for silverlight is a special version that will run in the Silverlight runtime and is "serializable" compatible with the corresponding version ordinary Csla.Net. Remember: Silverlight has only a subset of functionality compared to the .Net runtime - so Csla.Net for Windows will NOT compile for Silverlight.

If you are not going to do Silverlight then focus on Csla.Net for Windows and make sure to get the "Expert xx 2008 BusinessObject" book.

/jonnybee

rsbaker0 replied on Friday, September 18, 2009

JonnyBee:

...And I would also recommend to upgrade your projects as soon as new versions are released...

I'm not sure about this, especially if you aren't targeting the features in the new version. Within a particular major version, the patch updates can be valuable, but there have been significant changes between major CSLA versions in the 2 years I have been using it that have caused major application breakage (both obvious and subtle). I suggest that you need to coordinate a CSLA upgrade with a major regression test and probably new version of your own application.

To quote the old adage, "If it isn't broken, don't fix it."

RockfordLhotka replied on Friday, September 18, 2009

The challenge for all of us is that Silverlight is not just a different front end or UI technology - it has a different runtime. Sure, it looks a lot like .NET, but it is not quite the same...

This is much like the Compact Famework, which also looks like .NET but isn't (though Silverlight is a big enough subset to be wonderfully fun to use, unlike CF).

Of course it doesn't help that people are actively using several versions of .NET itself: 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, 3.5 SP1... They aren't completely interchangable either...

I rather suspect, however, that the pure 3.5 is about done - if you are 3.5, you are actually 3.5 SP1. So when I do the next release I'll probably remove CSLA .NET 3.5 from the "active" download area - so the options will basically be 1.5.3, 3.0.5 and 3.8.0.

That'll last for a very short period of time though, since .NET 4.0 is just around the corner - and it is a whole new runtime (unlike .NET 3.0 and 3.5, which build on the 2.0 core).