I have read the Cabana documentation regarding CAB developement as well as DevForce's MVC UI architecture.  At a very high level it appears that the major diffference between CAB and Devforce's MVC is seperation or creation of modules.  CAB seems the way to go but there is an obvious steep learning curve.

 

DevForce expressappFramework (XAF) amongst other infrastructure items, seems to have a relatively shallow learning curve for UI architecture creation.  http://www.devexpress.com/Help/?document=XAF - http://www.devexpress.com/Help/?document=XAF

I am not that interested in their other framework items and prefer DevForce EF for the remaining infrastructure.  Would XAF for UI and Devforce EF be easily compatible?  The advantages I see of using XAF for UI architecture mainly revolve around a top flight UI company creating a UI architecture tool with built support for future UI technolgies aka SilverLight.  Any thoughts?

 

 

DevForce EF, as you know, does not currently have any built-in UI support, although it does work well with our binding managers from DevForce 3.x.  We plan to add UI support into DEF later this year, but we honestly don't have a clear idea yet on what those UI features will be.   Today, you can use DEF business objects in either WinForms or WPF applications, and we are hard at work on a Silverlight-compatible release.

 

Cabana, our CAB reference application, is currently targeted to DevForce 3.x, but we do plan to provide a DEF version too.  We are also keeping an eye on Prism.

 

We have no experience with using the XAF from Developer Express.  It does look like a simpler approach than CAB, while still being a powerful development tool.  My primary concern would be whether XPO is a requirement for domain model objects within XAF, or whether you can plug in, or easily wrap, business objects generated by other tools.

 

Maybe other members of the DevForce community with XAF experience can chime in.