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Group: Forum Members
Posts: 533,
Visits: 2K
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Hi,
I was hearing about SF 2.0 for quite a long time, which mentioned will be including a lot of fanstatic features such as LINQ support, ORM mapper and etc. I would like to know, what is your roadmap for this? Will it be 2008, 2009 or... all this features will be released incrementally?
Thank you
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Group: Awaiting Activation
Posts: 592,
Visits: 3.7K
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This is probably the longest running thread on the forum and I may be wasting my time adding to it but hopefully someone from StrataFrame/MicroFour will provide some answers.
Since 2006, StrataFrame and the Enterprise application server has enabled my staff to quickly develop a number of high performance business applications to meet the unique needs of our business. Some of these applications are critical to our day-to-day operation. While I'm very satisfied with the product I'm becoming concerned that I've got a lot riding on something that appears to be all but abandoned by its vendor. Other than Ben, I haven't seen anyone from MicroFour on the forum is the last couple of years. Emails sent to MicroFour staff via the forum go unanswered. What used to be the best support I've ever seen from a software vendor has deteriorated to just about the worst. While I have the source to the majority of the framework there are parts that I don't have, like the Enterprise server, which makes me nervous when I see vendor support slipping. So far Ben has come through and fixed bugs in these areas (which I greatly appreciate) but I'm wondering how long I can expect that to continue.
I would really appreciate it if MicroFour would be more transparent about the future of this product. Is there ever going to be a SF 2.0 or maybe event a SF 1.8 that utilizes the new object model that they are already using in their medical applications? If not will there be any future enhancements to SF 1.0? Is the current release the end of the line and if so how long can I expect to maintain compatibility with future version of Visual Studio and SQL Server? Is there any good reason to continue to pay software support?
-Larry
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Group: StrataFrame Developers
Posts: 6.6K,
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[Wrong login - see below Andrew's reply]
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Group: StrataFrame Users
Posts: 91,
Visits: 3.4K
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This is really welcome and long overdue news Trent. Like Larry I had just about given up on a new release. I will look forward to downloading and investigating the alpha release and participating in the new forums. Unfortunately I am about to go on vacation but will look forward to the reaction and following progress.
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Group: StrataFrame Developers
Posts: 3K,
Visits: 2.5K
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You are only too right, Larry. And everyone else who has chimed-in in this thread and others over the years. It's the nature of the software business to have feature-creep, so we've always had the feeling that SFv2 just isn't quite ready. And by ready, I mean commercially ready. Does it have everything we (meaning Ben) want in it? No. Does it have documentation and samples? Not written down (it's all in my head, just have to pry it out  ). Does it have full unit test coverage? Ummm.... But you MicroFour is using it themselves, right? Yes, loads. All of our new projects, and new assemblies in old projects are SFv2 for the data access. (and the $1M question(s)) So, why can't we start playing with it? C'mon, man! Does it have to be 100% before we can take a look? ... ... *crickets* Well, no. We're using it. And we've come to the point where I don't know why you guys can't start using it some, too. There are big chunks missing (no new DDT, yet) (saving doesn't cascade through a tree), but there's soooo much stuff that makes it really worthwhile (multi-level undo) (OutlinedQueries (my absolute new best friend)) (EntityCollectionView.Filter "wait, did you just use a lambda for a filter?" yep) that there's no reason you can't have it in what we can call, say, "Alpha." Beta once we fill in all of the modules, and Release once we have full documentation and it's commercially ready. There are some 40 projects in the solution (templates, the visx, testing framework, working projects are all included in that), and we're going to release about 15 of them. The truth is, it's ready to have some other eyes on it. Enhancement requests, questions, watching how others use it, and documentation requests will help it mature far faster than keeping it locked up. So... I'm just going to leave this here... and you guys can do with it what you will... http://forumv2.strataframe.netAll of your users (email logins) have been converted over to the new forum, but you'll have to reset your passwords (some new hash/salt storage where I can't move those over). I promise I will keep an eye on my email and send you license files as quickly as I can. Edit: Sorry about posting as Trent earlier. Didn't realize that I was still logged in as him when I was testing some logins.
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