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CSLA Anyone?

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Alfred Ortega
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Alfred Ortega asked on 30 Nov 2006, 12:21 AM
Hola all,
I am getting ready to start a new project that will be using both web and windows clients and was considering using the CSLA framework for the middle tier work (http://www.lhotka.net/)  I was wondering if anyone here had any experience with it and what they thought about it, good and bad. 

Web piece will be using  telerik of course, but I'm really curious about the CSLA. 

Thanks in advance,

Al

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Accok5
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answered on 13 Apr 2007, 02:08 PM
A somewhat late response maybe, but I was browsing trough the forums when your post caught my eye.

I am using CSLA for quite some time now. Mainly (only!) for Web applications. I really feel comfortable creating bussines classes after use-cases and really really like the extensive binding and remote dataportal support CSLA gives.

I use the CodeSmith templates provided in the CSLAContrib CodePlex project as a base for my bussines classes. It really helped us to speed up development and in combination with the Telerik RAD Controls create stunning looking, extensible and maintainable N-tier web application.

Since your post was from last year, how did you find CSLA ?
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Mike
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answered on 15 Apr 2007, 01:39 PM
I have seen a lot of references in telerik forum indicating the CSLA works fine with databound controls.

There is even a blog post with tutorial on binding rad Grid with CSLA object at  codebetter.com located here:

http://codebetter.com/blogs/steve.hebert/archive/2007/02/25/Hiearchical-data-binding-with-CSLA-and-Telerik_2700_s-radGrid-control_2E00_.aspx
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Alfred Ortega
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answered on 16 Apr 2007, 02:18 PM
Remco & Mike,
So far I think it's pretty impressive but the validation method needs some improvement.  Sure beats building your own though.....
Thanks for the link, I imagine it should be no different than working with any ObjectDataSource and that usually works well.

Al
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Josef Rogovsky
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answered on 20 Apr 2007, 08:22 PM
I met Rocky Lhotka at VS!Live Toronto in 2005.

I attended a day long session where he demonstrated CSLA.

It's been a while since I've looked into it and things might have changed but at the time he did specifically mention that CSLA was not intended for thin clients and he didn't recommend it for web applicatoin development.

I figured he knew what he was talking about so I stopped pursuing it.

So now I'm wondering if things have indeed changed. Please let me know.
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Alfred Ortega
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answered on 23 Apr 2007, 12:12 PM
I think (hope) that has changed with th .Net 2.0 version.  In the latest version of his business objects books it has a thick client, thin client and web front end all working together so hopefully that can happen with a real world app as well.  I will have to check and make sure though so thanks for the warning.

Al 
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lprada
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answered on 23 Apr 2007, 12:23 PM
We use it en all our projects. Great Framework.
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Josef Rogovsky
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answered on 26 Apr 2007, 03:45 AM
Now that I think about it I seem to recall that CSLA made excellent use of serialized classes. And that there wasn't much practical use for this in web apps because the tiers are usually so flat (business logic is usually implemented as a DLL in the web app, not served externally) and the client software (ie, web browsers) can't take advantage of them.

So is this aspect of the CSLA simply not used or has something changed in the framework to optimize for web apps differently?

Something else that I didn't agree with was that Rocky was opposed to using T-SQL for more than insert, delete, update and select. He said that Microsoft historically changes their database APIs every 2.5 years and optimizing too heavily for one platform will cause problems down the road. I agree with him on this in general but from experience I know of many times where some tightly optimized T-SQL was able to run significantly faster (hundreds of times faster) than the same logic implemented at a higher level in an application.

I still get a thrill when I'm able to implement something novel in T-SQL that would just be a clunky mess if I did it external from the DB server.
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Alfred Ortega
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answered on 26 Apr 2007, 07:35 PM
I also disagree with using sprocs only for CRUD actions against the db.  I use sprocs for everything and the result is an API for the developer to have against the DB built and optimized by DBA's.  The fact that db's get updated and things change also apply to programming languages and platforms as well so that logic fails to make sense to me.  Just because we can take advantage of generics in 2.0 doesn't mean we rewrite every collection in all our applications.
However as a base to start with it seems to offer a lot of functionality and allow programmers to focus on the business logic rather than the architecture of the application.

Al
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Alfred Ortega
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Accok5
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Mike
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Alfred Ortega
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Josef Rogovsky
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lprada
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