My First Acropolis Impressions

Today I’ve installed the Acropolis CTP1 and gave it a try. The first impression was great:

·         Shell design based on a wizard

·         A nice designer to make the plumbing (Services, Views, Connection points, etc)

Although, I was sort of disappointed with the associated documentation. It is up to 11 pages (including 2 walkthrough pages).

After implementing my first application, which consisted only of displaying an empty view, I went looking for a CAB feature comparison. I’ve started to get disappointed… The most prominent missing feature is Application Module support!!

Looking for some answers regarding some lack of features when comparing to CAB I’ve read that, although there are no official commitments, there are plans to support everything that CAB currently support.

I’ve google about confronting CAB and Acropolis, and I’ve found other people also worried about the actual Acropolis momentum. After the initial fuss it seems that we must lower down our expectations at least for now. I’ve found an interesting post that contains a in depth analysis of the current momentum of Acropolis, made by Ward Bell product manager for the DevForce .NET enterprise application development product from IdeaBlade.

From that post I’ve highlight the following sentences:

“this project appears to be in trouble and seems unlikely to deliver on schedule a year from now.”

“CAB seems to be appropriate only for projects with multiple modules, lots of screen, and complex application logic.”

“Acropolis intends to be far more approachable without sacrificing architectural integrity. We should be able to build simple Acropolis applications quickly and then grow them as the waves of requirements roll in – without having to scrap our initial implementation and re-build the foundation.”

“I see its CAB heritage. I see how it fills in some important gaps in CAB and will be easier to learn and easier to use than CAB. Acropolis could be truly great.”

“Acropolis is supposed to deliver in about a year.”

“newly released CTP1 is manifestly fragile. Every API is subject to change. There were no feature commitments. There were no architectural commitments. There was not even an inventory of project goals.”

“We were told to expect a complete “code reset” in the next few months. One observer called it a “code flush”.”

“I spoke to several industry veterans. They were almost scornful. Acropolis, in their view, was not even half baked.”

 “Everyone agrees – including the Acropolis team – that you should not use Acropolis today. Read about it? Absolutely. “Spike” with it? If you can afford the time. But I personally can’t afford to do more than poke at it with a long stick until it is more thoroughly baked.”

 So, to me, Acropolis seems to be very promising, but is still far fromwhat should be expected from the CAB successor.

Installing Enterprise Library, GAT/GAX, CAB and factories under Windows Vista

Tom Hollander has posted some usefull tips for installing GAT/GAX and factories under Windows Vista. The same applies to Enterprise Library and CAB

Basically you need to run everything as Administrator.

Another important aspect is that, if you accept the default installation paths of Enterprise Library and CAB, you need also to run Visual Studio 2005 as Administrator when building this solutions. This is because Windows Vista restricts the access to ”Program Files” folder.

For more related information see also this post from Hugo Ribeiro.

Another CAB related case study

Commonwealth Bank of Australia CommSee Solution: Case Study. Commonwealth Bank of Australia designed, developed, and implemented its CommSee application, a relationship banking solution custom-built by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Its architecture inspired patterns&practices implementation of CAB and serves as great source of ideas on building composite smart clients and SOA applications. Ron Jacob recorded series of video interviews with the CommSee core team available on Channel 9.

HelloWorld with CAB and SCSF

A simple walkthroug that’s a good start to understand the basis of CAB and SCSF.

Note: Before you start there’s some pre-requisits that should be observed.

Infragistics CAB Toolkit

Infragistics made available the NetAdvantage CAB Extensibility Kit™ (NCEK) within the NetAdvantage for Windows Forms.

Visit the Infragistics CAB Resource Center for more details.

CAB and SCSF resources

Eugenio Pace, product manager at Microsoft Patterns & Practices, has compiled a list of resources about the CAB and the SCSF. This can be really useful if you are using these technologies or want to know more.

CAB & Smart Client Software Factory real world experiences

Mario Szpuszta from Microsoft Austria has written a good whitepaper that captures his experiences in the Austrian Raiffeisen Bank with CAB and the Smart Client Software Factory.

Download it from here.