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

I am using CSLA as the business object framework for a medium size project. The framework has come a long way from the VB6 days and offers an extraordinary amount of flexibility and "out of the box" functionality. CSLA's mobile smart objects makes UI development much easier. However, I agree with others it isn't the right tool for every situation. There is definitely some overhead involved, but also a lot of power. Personally, I am looking forward to using the CSLA Light with Silverlight.

Pros:

• Data technology agnostic¹
• Large install base and it's FREE!!
• Stable and Logical framework
• Data Access code can be in your objects or in a separate assembly
• Property and Object Validation and Authorization

Cons

• The code can be a lot to maintain²
• Probably need a code generator to use effectively
• Learning curve. The structure of CSLA objects are easy to grasp, but the caveats can create headaches.

I'm not sure about test driven design. I don't unit test or test driven design (shame on me), so I don't know if unit tests are different than TDD, but I know that the most recent version of the framework comes with unit tests.

¹ Good thing because data access technologies never stay the same for long.
² This has gotten better with recent versions of the framework.