Smart Client Software Factory April 2008 Alpha Available

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For the past month or so, Blaine and I have been overseeing the development of the April release of the Smart Client Software Factory.  This release is being done mostly by a team of vendors, freeing Blaine to run Prism and I to run the Acceptance Testing Guidance project.  Blaine and I are still very involved, and I still review code changes at random, but the team does most of the work.  The team has been doing a great job, and I think the community will be pleased with the results.

This is a port of SCSF to VS2008 and the .NET 3.5 framework.  It uses Enterprise Library 3.1, not 4.0, intentionally.  There is very little in 4.0 that will effect CAB and SCSF development, except Unity.  Using Unity would require a nearly full re-write of CAB, and we don't currently have the time or people to do it right and deliver on our other commitments.  However, if you really need EntLib4.0, it should work, and if not, you have the source code to fix it.

We did need to create a custom data provider to wrap the SqlCE functionality, as the version number of the platform DLL went from 9.x to 3.5.  This replaces the EntLib 3.1 provider for SQLCE. 

Also, this version of SCSF, just like the last one, supports hosting WPF controls in your WinForms CAB application.  It does not support a full WPF app.  For that, you want to see Prism or the Smart Client Factory Contrib project on CodePlex.

We are also fixing a few bugs, and updating the guidance package (Visual Studio automation) to work in VS2008.

You can download the Alpha release from the SCSF CodePlex community site. 

Warning: This is an Alpha.  We did a minimal amount of testing ("It compiles and links."  -- "Good enough.  Ship it"), and the computer we installed it on still boots, still runs VS, and seems ok.  Use at your own risk.

We are trying to get this project wrapped up this month.  If you see issues, please post them to the Issue Tracker at the SCSF CodePlex community site, and/or post to the discussion forum there.  We will try to get any major problems, but will not be adding features.

Blaine is also posting about this SCSF April 2008 Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 Published to CodePlex