P&P Day One: CSLA Framework Lessons Learned

The fourth scheduled talk for the day was given by Rockford Lhotka. He is the author of CSLA .Net, which is a object oriented based framework. According to him it’s the most widely used open source object framework for .Net. I’d not heard of it before, so I must not be paying enough attention.

The speaker kept trying to sell the idea of a framework by saying it lowers the “surface area” that a developer needs to know. I completely agree that in today’s development world the technology is moving too quickly for us to keep up with it. However, I’m not sure I buy the argument that it is better for our developers to not understand how things work. He advocated that knowing how ADO.Net works is not important as long as they know the framework you are using that abstracts ADO.Net. I don’t agree with this as a developer myself. Sure, I’m a bring proponent for frameworks, but knowing how ADO.Net works ensures that if I change positions or jobs I’m not at a disadvantage just because the new place doesn’t use that framework I was using before.

Some good points I did take from the talk were about how to make your framework a success:

• Keep the faith - meaning keep the goal of the framework as your guiding light about what should and should not be in the framework.
• Remain consistent - consistent in the architecture, consistent in the goal, etc.
• Document and Evangelize: make the framework well documented and easy to understand. Enlist a core set of evangelists to help spread the word and give feedback.