Daniel,

It is not my desire to pile-on but your continued threats are becoming tiresome.  If you want to use CSLA then go with our blessings.  I might note that I frequent Rocky's forum and it seems you pose similar complaints to him.

Daniel, although not as experienced as you, I have been in the business for 33 years and also have thousands of customers.  The new .NET experience has taught me one huge lesson: knowledge is not a function of time but of learning.  My past experiences helped but ultimately they did not carry the day.

The SF team has been extremely accommodating to your cause, I know for a fact on multiple occasions a team member was walking out the door for the evening and you would call, and they would stay behind for an hour or more to help, at no cost to you.

Nevertheless, it is our continued desire to make you happy but you must take a different approach.  It is our belief that SF is the best the market has to offer and with the advent of our new Enterprise Server we have distanced SF from the competitors.

Very, very true Steve. Well said! Good examples are Trent and Ben (Chase, not me )

..ßen

Daniel,

I switched from CSLA to StrataFrame in December 2005 because I wanted to concentrate on building applications and not spend my time maintaining a development framework. CSLA is a great learning tool, but to get the functionality I needed I had to add in ActiveObjects and code developed by other members of the CSLA forum. On top of that were CodeSmith templates to create and maintain (unless you enjoy writing property statements). I'm not belittling the contributions of these individuals, but after putting all that together I still didn't have all the functionality offered by that early version of StrataFrame.

I may not have 40 years of development experience, but (unfortunately) I'm pretty close. I've run into bumps along the way with every programming tool I've ever used, including StrataFrame. There are other .Net frameworks out there but I feel SF offers the best value (and my organization purchased licenses when the were going for $1,295). Does StrataFrame do everything I would like the way I would like it? No. Does it make my staff more productive and allow them to concentrate on solving our organization's business needs? That would be a resounding yes! It's obvious I feel this is a great product, but what really sets it apart is MicroFour's commitment to providing excellent customer service at all levels. I work for local government and they have gone out of their way to accommodate our arcane purchasing process. In the area of technical support they are second to none. They've provided next day patches when I've run into bugs. They have been very patient and supportive in helping me resolve issues of my own making. In the time I've been using the product there has only been one issue that took some time to resolve since it appeared to be unique to my environment, but they eventually fixed it.

If you want a full featured and reliable development framework with top notch support from a company that obviously cares about its customers, I would suggest that you work with them to get it running in your environment. If on the other hand you want a framework where you can have everything your way and don't mind maintaining it, CSLA may be your best bet. My users don't care what development tools we use, they just want reliable solutions as quickly as possible.

One final thing to consider is that StrataFrame isn't just something put together by a group of developers who think it could be used to develop commercial grade software. They actually "eat their own dog food" and use it in their own line of successful medical applications. About the only negative thing I can think of is that they're located in Amarillo TX; not the easiest place to get to from the California Bay area for training. But I hear they make up for it with free beer

-Larry

I apologize for launching into a tirade. It's the result of the conflict between my interest in using the product and my inability to get it up and running. In the future I will try to confine my questions to specific technical issues. It's not really my intention to be an irritant. I would appreciate a gentle nudge if I stray off this path.



I guess that before I ask you to do anything more than you have already done, I will have to reformat the hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch.



Before I do that it would help me to know if the the following things that I have installed are known to create an incompatibility with StrataFrame:

Oracle add-in for VS2005

DB2 add-in for VS2005

DevExpress suite

Xceed suite

ComponentOne suite

CodeRush

Refactor Pro

CodeSmith

ReSharper

SQL Server Integration Services

Visual Studio Tools for Office



Thank you for your professional assistance,

Dan

Hey Daneil;



I think Larry did a good job of pointing out why SF is such a great product. I'm with you, I graduated in 1981 and have gone through many products since then. When I started .Net I had come from Borland's Delphi (which has a great IDE), and I missed many things that should have been in VS. So, over one year I researched many (and I mean many hours), looking at many products and there were several points I looked for:

Architecture

Support

Cost

3-tier support



And guess what, this is where I landed. I'm responding to you, because I feel someone with your level of experience deserves some feedbacks from people like me who have been around.



I spend over a month asking questions (before I had spend a penny), and SF team answered my questions with full interest. The support is the BEST and I even signed up for the next month training to learn more.



Take care!


..ßen

Thanks for the reply. It sounds like I did pretty much the same research that you did and I came to the same conclusion. On paper StrataFrame is near perfect. I've run into some problems (obviously unusual) in getting up and running, but the concept is so great that I'm not prepared to give up. I will keep trying until I get the problems resolved.



Again,thanks for the encouragement,

Dan

Hi Daniel.

Well, I wish I could tell you that I was only 22 years old and that I had never seen a punch card and FORTRAN in my life, but unfortunately it's not the case.

Not trying to be obvious, but if you are formating your HD (something I thought of telling you before, but didn't dare), I guess you could first try a basic installation with the requirements for the framework and see it running. Then you can go creating Restore Points in windows and build on the top of it.

Are you coming to the class on May? It looks like it is going to be very productive and fun!

Cheers.

I have mixed feeling (obviously) about reformatting. It takes so long to install (or remove) the various VS components and VS itself that it probably won't take any longer to start from scratch than to experiment around with trying various incremental removals and reinstalls.

I will consider your suggestion carefully before I do anything drastic.

Thanks,

Dan