I've been waiting patiently for Silverlight v2.0 and Blend 2.0 before really giving too much time to WPF and Silverlight but the featureset is now getting there and it's worth the time investing in learning resources.

Looking around the web there is great opportunity to be in at the begining of these exciting technologies. 

http://www.nibblestutorials.net/ 

Scott Gutherie the Program Manager for many .NET technologies at Microsoft including IIS and Visual Studio announces the release of the .NET framework source code.

Whilst it's not quite open source it certainly helps to see how production quality code is written.  It's .NET v3.5 and VS2008 only but it's certainly a start.

Check it out. http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/03/releasing-the-source-code-for-the-net-framework-libraries.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!!!   

After years of tracking other people's blogs I though it about time I start my own.   I randomly come across useful bits of information on my searches around the web and thought I need a place to store them. 

I'm the principal architect of www.picturenation.co.uk a user generated content image library in the UK.  I focus on ASP.NET, SQL Server & .NET technologies. 

Thanks for listening.

Matt