Does anyone have any real-world experience of CSLA?

Question

The main web application of my company is crying out for a nifty set of libraries to make it in some way maintainable and scalable, and one of my colleagues has suggested CS

Answer 1

Not to take CSLA of the list, but before using it, research the benefits and make sure they really apply. Will your team be able to correctly/consistently implement it? Remoting and portal dance needed?

I think beyond all the theoretical ponder, it is all about clean/maintainable/extendable/testable code following basic proven patterns.

I counted lines of code needed in a specific domain of a project converted from CSLA. Between all the different CSLA objects(readonly+editable+root+list combinations) and their stored procs it took about 1700 lines, versus a Linq2SQL + Repository implementation that took 180 lines. The Linq2SQL version consisted mostly of generated classes that your team doesn’t need to consume book to understand. And yes, I used CodeSmith to generate the CSLA parts, but I now believe in DRY code with single responsibility bits, and the CSLA implementation now looks to me like yesterday’s hero.

As an alternative I would like to suggest looking into Linq2Sql/Entity Framework/NHibernate combined with Repository and UnitOfWork patterns. Have a look at http://www.codeplex.com/backgroundmotion

Cheers!