CAB Musings

I mentioned before that I've been using the Microsoft Composite UI App Block (CAB) for 8 months now and it's one of the most impressive tookits ever to come out of Microsoft. It's version 1.0 and unlike the conventional wisdom that Microsoft needs three versions to get it right, CAB is right from the get-go. Likely a result of the intense use of Agile practices by that team.

That's not to say that I haven't seen places where it can improve. Not the "I have this special need to override some down in the weeds behavior" kind of thing, but something that hits anyone who uses CAB (and its cousin SC-SF) - performance lag due to ObjectBuilder reflecting through assemblies looking for its attributes each time an application starts.

Interestingly enough the Mobile SC-SF team solved this problem with that variant of SC-SF. The solution they came up with is relevant to the Desktop variety also. Basically, scan the assemblies and build an XML profile of where the attributes are, but do this during a build cycle, not when an application starts up. Essentially build a cache of the data and re-use it.

Sounds like a v2.0 feature for the mainline CAB/SC-SF in my book.

Posted by Mark M. Baker at 11:35 PM  Permalink