I've a strong desire to become more active in the 'blogsphere' and therefore I'm re-launching this site. 

My focus now will primarily be on the Umbraco CMS product but I will continue to look into Rocky Lhotka's CSLA.NET framework.  Both products are mature stable applications and most importantly for the Small to Medium sized Enterprise (SME) sector that I work in, they are both free or subject to flexible licence agreements.

This site is actually only a temporary one whilst I build an Umbraco version.  :-)  

I've got a couple of nice Umbraco packages to launch soon as well, so watch this space.

Quick tip on how to use CSLA objects on a SQL 2005 Reporting Services instance.

http://forums.lhotka.net/forums/post/13747.aspx 

For any of you unfamiliar with CSLA.NET I suggest you take a look straight away. CSLA.NET is a framework for building enterprise class OO .NET applications and is born out of a 10 year long almost evangelical philosophy by its author Rockofrd Lhotka.

Rocky started his series of books on distributed object orientated applications during the very early VB5 days.  With the arrival of .NET both C# and VB Rocky’s ideals were finally matched by the technologies.  I can assure you that COM and distributed computing was not as easy as Microsoft would have had us believe.

Iterating through the .NET versions 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 & soon to be v3.5 CSLA.NET has always mirrored the .NET roadmap and has been at the forefront of best practice.

Your objects inherit from CSLA.NET base objects and assume a whole host of additiona lfunctionality not provided by .NET itself. 

Top Features

n-level undo
Full support for object databinding in Windows Forms and ASP.NET
Strongly typed paretn child relationships
Field level centralised authorisation
Business rule management.
Database/storage layer abstraction
Web service integration

I’ve met Rocky a few times in Vegas and Orlando conferences although he wouldn’t know me from Adam and not only is his framework top notch he is one of the world’s top speakers at all .NET conferences.

CSLA.NET is described in detail in a number of books VB & C# and later versions of the books are available as PDF eBooks. 

Short of a simple and fair licence whose only major caveat is that you can’t replicate the framework (or a derivative of) to sell as an application framework it is actually free to use.  It provides create structure to your development and helps to abstract and layer a project to obtain great re-use.  Using OO principals it’s also great for hiding and masking the many Microsoft data access technologies over the years.  DAO, ADO, ADO.NET & LINQ anybody??????

As part of my reference application, see later posts, I intend developing using CSLA.NET in C# for the foreseeable future.

Cheers Rocky!!!