Exciting things about XAF not exciting enough?

21 May 2008

I've heard some criticism about the first post in my 10 exciting things to know about XAF series: apparently it's not exciting enough! Well, let me tell you: the day that we don't receive a single support request about the matters I mentioned in that blog post will be the happy day where I agree that this is a boring topic.

If you can honestly say that you understand everything I mentioned and you observe these practices in all your projects (or at least that you have spent a lot of time making a decision and you have good reasons not to follow the practices), then that's great -- more power to you! But... (a) the series is targeted at new users of the technology to at least the same extent as existing users, (b) there wasn't any overview like the one I created before and we get enough feedback asking for that kind of summarized "what do I need to know" information and finally (c), and I don't mean this condescendingly, the majority of our users are somewhere on the curve as opposed to at its end.

It's all about the learning curve here -- one of the comments we hear about XAF most is that it has such a very steep learning curve. To be honest, I don't really agree with that statement, since it is often made when people throw large independent "blocks of knowledge" in with their product-specific learning. Learning XAF is easy, assuming you have strong OO programming knowledge. It seems hardly correct to say that XAF has a steep learning curve if the knowledge that's really so hard to come by is largely not specific to XAF. But be that as it may -- my target is to help everybody get to the same level, and in order to do that we need lots of content in various different formats, we need to make it accessible and discoverable, and often we need to be repetitive as well.

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