A Silverlight Cabana?

   I had an exchange with G. on the prospects for something like Cabana in the WPF / Silverlight world. I thought I'd share it here in the forum.

-------- G writes, 7/28/2009 ----

I'm sure I had a twitter from Ward saying he was working on a Silverlight equivalent to Cabana, your Microsoft CAB based product. The Silverlight equivalent would use Prism rather than CAB. Cabana was a pretty full featured application, not some simple demo and as such could be used as an application starting point which saved months and months of work. 

What I would like to know is, if and when will you be releasing a DevForce Silverlight application built on Prism which will have the same level of functionality as Cabana?

-------- Ward replies 7/29/2009 ------

I don�t remember tweeting that I �was working on a Silverlight equivalent to Cabana�.  I can imagine myself saying that I intend to do such a thing. I�m not ready to start though.

When I wrote Cabana I had years of experience writing WinForms applications. I knew how folks tended to structure their UIs (the Outlook look) , how they did forms-over-data, how they presented modules in separate tabs of a shell�s tab control.

I was also enamored of infrastructure that relied on inheritance.

Today, I don�t know what the popular visual metaphors and interaction paradigms will be for Silverlight business applications. I think it is a misuse of Silverlight�s potential to merely reproduce what was common for WinForms. I say that having done essentially that in Prism Explorer.

Today I realize that the deeply nested infrastructure that was Cabana (and CAB) is not such a great idea. I�m looking to thinner, more composed structures these days. If  you look at Prism and Prism Explorer you will see only shallow inheritance in the classes.

All in all, I�m a good six months from feeling ready to pronounce on what a Cabana equivalent should be. Then I can try to develop it. Better yet, I�m hoping to borrow from others.

If you�ve been following my blog and my tweets you�ll notice that I am much involved with the community of experts who are working through these patterns and paradigms.

Wish I had a better answer. I still feel that Silverlight productivity trumps WinForms productivity once you get the hang of it. It�s worth the journey.

---- G replies 7/30/2009 ----

To be honest I can't remember exactly what that tweet said so I paraphrased with wishful thinking in mind!

I too am enamoured with the relative simplicity (compared with CAB) of Prism and the overall productivity gains with Silverlight. I am thinking about delivering some small, simple apps first and keeping a close eye on the community for where thinking is going. I do not want to begin a large project only to flounder with concern over the best patterns. 

I have built a fairly large application using Cabana as my base and DevForce Classic as it is now known. I can (and do) add new functionality with relative ease and I so greatly respect your work. The deep inheritance does however appear complex compared with how one might construct something similar with Prism.

I read your blog regularly and I am deeply impressed with DevForce Silverlight. I am on vacation now but if I'm honest I can't wait to get back to work on this stuff!

Thanks again Ward, keep up the great work.

--- Ward replies 7/30/2009---

Thanks for all of that encouragement, G It�s the kind of thing that keeps us motivated. Stay in touch � Regards, Ward 