Expert Business Objects: Read It, Even If You Don’t Need The Framework

I’ve been reading Rocky Lhotka’s Expert C# 2008 Business Objects book. CSLA is a bit of a polarizing framework. A lot of comments on the book are along the lines of “outlived it’s usefulness given the current framework updates” or just generally “not keeping up with modern software trends.” It should also be noted that here are also a lot of positive comments from satisfied framework users.

Here’s what I think so far. The text of the book, not necessarily the framework will change the way I do development. Rocky leverages implements many key interfaces and observes many simple conventions that lead to a smooth experience with objects in any .Net UI paradigm (WPF, Silverlight, Web, WinForms, etc). It’s a case study in all of the things your objects should do to ease databinding and support transactions and multilevel undo. And that says nothing of the way these objects support remote calls (via marshalling or traditional copy by value calls).

True, the framework could stand to get away from singleton methods and other aspects that make unit testing and mocking more difficult. But reading this book, I think most developers and architects with any reusable frameworks of their own will realize just how many opportunities they missed.