Smart Client Software Factory V2

The Microsoft Patterns & Practices group is busy updating the highly successful Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) that was released in July 2006. Afterwards, the team moved on to the Web client version of the toolkit called the Web Client Software Factory (WCSF). However, they're back now evolving the SCSF to support new features including integration with the Windows Presentation Framework, Microsoft Vista, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and SQL Compact Edition.

If you are doing anything with desktop-based .NET applications (even one that you wouldn't call a Smart Client), do yourself and your team a favor and get a free copy of SCSF. You can find it here at CodePlex which is the P&P team's area for hosting these projects. There is a wealth of samples, tutorials, etc that you can refer to when getting started with SCSF.

This is one of those rare software offerings that provides a team with a sound and well thought out architectural model for developing applications. Instead of worrying about how various parts of your object model, UI, database layer, etc will "talk" to each other, SCSF provides subsystems that will help with this. Parts of SCSF also help by generating code to ease the creation of new forms, business objects and so on. Particularly if you want an architecture which offers a pluggable component model whereby you can add or remove functionality at the assembly level, SCSF is definitely the ticket.

I was fortunate to be asked to participate on the Advisory Board of SCSF for V1 and Microsoft has asked me to participate again for V2. You can track the progress of the team in V2 by bookmarking Blaine Wastell's blog (the PM of SCSF).

Let me know if you've been using SCSF and what your experiences have been.

Posted by Mark M. Baker at 04:09 PM  Permalink