Hello,

My trial period has expired but I am glad to see that I can still post a question.  I have read here before that plans for version 2 should be around mid year and that you have plans to support Silverlight and WPF.

I am also evaluating DevForce and have been very impressed with their support for SL & WPF.  As a matter of fact, Winforms and Webforms seem to have been pushed back and most everything in their product is now pointing in this new direction.

Now to my questions.

1.  I was wondering if someone could expand on exactly what your plans are around SL & WPF?  I am not pushing the schedule issue because I know how that works and besides, by the time I can be up to speed on your product, June should be here!  I am interested in how you plan to tie them into your products and how this will affect the way StrataFrame is used.

2.  I also have been wondering about the role of Enterprise Server.  It seems to me (with my limited knowledge) that using ES with Silverlight would be the way to go.  Would this be considered a Best Practise?

Overall I am very impressed with Strataframe and it seems to fit my programming style very well.  I love the Database deployment utility and can't imagine deploying an app without the benefit of the security roles module.  I just am concerned about making the right choice as relates to the newer technology.

Thanks,
Bill Mason

I don't think there is much future in building anything using Linq to Sql.  Linq to Entities is the future and that sort of requires ... entities.

WPF right now is all about the Entity Framework, the MVVM pattern and a very decoupled model using IOC and DI. 

As Trent said, with WPF it is pretty much all or nothing so I'd be very surprised if a future version of SF looked a whole lot like the current SF. 

SF / Winforms right now is about the perfect package for the technologies it addresses.  Personally, I'd like to see the same smarts that went into developing that go into a new DDT working with the Entity Model and then model layer for business logic coupled with easy generation of View Models. 

The magic SF provides in controls would be really unnecessary in a WPF implementation, attention could be given to developing on the MVVM pattern and genereting tests. 

IOW, I don't see a WPF version of SF being backward compatible with SF Winforms.  The paradigms of good design in Winforms / Datasets vs WPF/EF are just too different.  At best, migration of the data structures from the DDT and good documentation on best practices for migrating business layer logic would be wonderful.

I'd like to see something that starts with all the good smo stuff in DDT and uses T4 to build model and view model framework and test classes.  IMO, DDT is the big competitive edge if leveraged properly.  The weakest part of EF right now is putting EDMX changes correctly back into the storage model, but if DDT could pick up those changes and incorporate them into the pkg ...

Just my 2c with no inside knowledge whatsoever of what Microfour has planned or how far along they are.