Gary's Blog

Count me in!!  I've been meaning to tackle the beasts that are XAF and XPO...

waiting is

I  was evaluating XAF and MVC Platforms from June 07. I like XAF very much but daunting task to understand the documentation.

The documentation is very terse with no relevant examples and the videos are very basic, they do not explain the security applied on the model or UI objects to display/hide.

I hope you will add value to it.

Gary,

Welcome. Here's an idea that I have been toying with but will never find time to do. How about starting a XAF web project (or even better, dual UI - web/clickonce smartclient) that allows users to browse and upload user-written XAF artifacts. For example, you could have a section for controllers, one for domain classes, one for XAF property editors and so on. It would be a good learning experience to develop, provide a XAF showcase and create a value added XAF portal in the process. And then why not publish the source as a working example of XAF best practice? You could even use it to host your groks, snippets and so on. It may not be ready by lunch but I reckon it could be done within a week.

Jascha

@Shankar, I hope I'll add value too, but if I'm not clear on something then don't hesitate to mail me and call me out on it.

@Jascha, spending time creating an example project has been spoken about a lot around here. The trouble, as always, is finding the resource to do it, if they are doing that then they are not doing other things. Getting the community involved in writing the example might be a good idea but then how would DX ensure quality?

One thing is for sure, we don't have all the answers, do you have specific ideas on this front?

Gary,

>>>The trouble, as always, is finding the resource to do it

Sorry - I didn't make myself clear - I was suggesting that you might undertake this (small) project since it seems to fit the XAF evangelical role (that IIRC you have been given) while also delivering a number of other benefits at the same time. I.e. you are the resource ;-)

Jascha,

Sure I could do this (and in fact this idea has been talked about) but would a small application be fit for purpose. Most people can figure out the problems surrounding a small application by themselves, it's the problems around enterprise scale issues that people need help with and creating an enterprise scale app is no mean feat, for one person.

Of course, there is nothing to stop us throwing up some kind of Codeplex project and getting myself and other community members to work on it, thus utilising spare capacity in the community to create an example enterprise scale application detailing how to solve the problems that the community themselves want to see solved.

Well as you can see I’m not highly imaginative when it comes to blog post titles but I thought

I think the documentation for XAF needs to be formatted differently than the standard API type documentation DevExpress uses.

T think more of a book format, toc, chapters, index, etc. would be more appropriate.

The only reason I am not using XAF on my current project is that I can't determine if it's extensible enough from the documentation, and like most developers, I can't wait to find out midway through the project that it is not.

I realize documentatio is painful, but if you really want the framework to be used by professionals, we need more up front explanaition of the extensibility points, how to write controllers, better coverage of the existing modules.

It sounds like this product is going to change in big ways, according to the roadmap, and I also wonder how this would affect the upgrade process for existing applications.

I almost think of this as the DotNetNuke for forms applications. I think adoption of the framework hinges on great documentation. After all the Demos are somewhat trivial and don't address the things developers are going to need to do in a real world business appication.

I hope someday, through confidence in the product, convinced by the documentation, that I will be able to select XAF for my real world projects.

Today, I just don't feel comfortable doing that, because there is just know wayto know what its capabilities and limitations are from the docs, and I a not fortunate enough to have the time to learn it thouroughly from the source and examples and knowledgebase articles.  It's way too time consuming.

Please write some comprehensive documentation.

BTW knowledgebase articles are great, bit areoften hard to find, and should be incorporated into the documentation if they are popular and accurate.

The knowledge base has its value, but finding the right article can be like finding a needle in a haystack.

Thanks for the blogs.

Dan Arnold