Hello Stuart Hemming,
I am happy to let you know that we have already started working on a series of help topics and examples that will guide our customers that are doing n-tier development with OpenAccess. This guide will cover multiple service and UI technologies and will probably be ready for the Q3 2010 release of OpenAccess.
Until then I suggest that you take a look at the following code library project:
http://www.telerik.com/community/code-library/orm/general/northwind-wcf-n-tier-demo-application.aspx
And you could also use the AutoMapper project in order to make persistent object to business object mapping easier:
http://automapper.codeplex.com/
Regarding your forward mapped model and the old wizards:
Obviously we are changing the direction of development of OpenAccess towards the visual designer and the context.
You must have in mind however, that this change will not happen overnight and although the old reverse and forward mapping wizards are not available from the OpenAccess menu by default they are still accessible if you need them.
In order to help our customers migrate their projects we introduced the upgrade tool. However, currently this tool can only migrate reverse mapped models (created with the reverse mapping wizard). We plan to implement migration of forward mapped projects for the Q3 2010 release of OpenAccess.
Depending on the state of your project I suggest the following:
1. if your project already is running in production, I suggest that you continue using the forward mapping wizard, at least until the upgrade tool can migrate these kinds of projects
2. if you are starting a new project, I suggest that you use the visual designer
I hope this answers some of your questions.
Do not hesitate to write again if you have more.
Sincerely yours,
Jordan
the Telerik team
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