Greeings All,

I came across Microsoft's CAB application block and found it very interesting. I am not a big fan of Microsoft's other application blocks (specially the data acces one) but I found this one very interesting and promising. I wanted to probe the opinion of other people of this forum if any one has used this application block specially with LLBL

I too have looked seriously into the CAB and found it interesting and a candiate for my current project. I have not tried it w/ LLBL however as I like using the Janus WinForm controls and they don't currently support the CAB completely. I would have to take a step back in my GUI look/feel. It appears component makers are beginning to support the CAB however, and I believe Infragistics NetAdvantage 2006 does now.

I didn't see anything in my review of the CAB to preclude using LLBL easily.

Brett wrote:

I too have looked seriously into the CAB and found it interesting and a candiate for my current project. I have not tried it w/ LLBL however as I like using the Janus WinForm controls and they don't currently support the CAB completely. I would have to take a step back in my GUI look/feel. It appears component makers are beginning to support the CAB however, and I believe Infragistics NetAdvantage 2006 does now.

I didn't see anything in my review of the CAB to preclude using LLBL easily.

In what way don't your controls support CAB?

I thought CAB was independent with regard to the contents of its Smartparts - unless you have a Janus UserControl equivalent that you wanted to use as a base

Cheers Simon

In my application, I use the Janus Panel Manager with panels that can be panels or tabs, the user can drag/drop them where they want (either in the panels on the side or in the tabbed MID area). I may be mistaken, or just not familiar enough with the CAB, but it appears you can have a tabbed area for the smart parts, but they are not easily, via user control, docked, undocked, moved around, etc, between tabs and panels. It may be possible, but it didn't appear to be the frameworks goal or intention in the design based on my read and lab examples I ran through.

Brett wrote:

In my application, I use the Janus Panel Manager with panels that can be panels or tabs, the user can drag/drop them where they want (either in the panels on the side or in the tabbed MID area). I may be mistaken, or just not familiar enough with the CAB, but it appears you can have a tabbed area for the smart parts, but they are not easily, via user control, docked, undocked, moved around, etc, between tabs and panels. It may be possible, but it didn't appear to be the frameworks goal or intention in the design based on my read and lab examples I ran through.

Ah I see, maybe you need to write a Workspace that supports docking windows. Maybe this link will give some help: http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/DockableCabWorkspaces.asp

Its not based on Janus docking windows but SandDock's version but might help you get started (I wouldn't wait for Janus to write one!) and it should only need writing once.

Cheers Simon

I was burned badly by its prevous incarnation as the user interface process block, so am pretty wary of it. Quality of the other PAG stuff has improved greatly over the original releases though.

I have used UIP and Exceptional handling application blocks in several of my projects. The first project was difficult, but the learning curve was well worth it .

I came across one bug in UIP that took several days to investigate and fix, but looking back, if I had to design, code and test functionality that they provided, then it would have been costly and risky - just like if I was to not use LLBLGen Pro and instead decided to 'write' access to DB .

Just my penny worth feedback

Oh BTW, Enterprise library had now replaced the application blocks and I believed WWF is intended to take over from UIP. I have not worked with these, but I understand (from reading MS press ) they are a lot more stable and well integrated.

I'm am currently using CAB in our enterprise, where I am taking many of the existing applications and porting them into one application. The block is very flexible and powerful, and I've been able to do some pretty neat things with it so far. My favorites are the dependency injection and event broker components. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask, I've spent some time up in Redmond regarding the product.

where can i find out about how to set up my CAB application so that the application is thread safe, and cached appropiately? I read that this can be managed through Services, and dynamic injection. On the contrary, I was told that this can be handled using Enterprise Library cached application block. Last, but not least, i was informed that you can implement this at the class level, creating immutable classes, and caching them accordingly. Any suggestions?

Perhaps you should ask the question as well on the Microsoft enterprise library forums ? (I don't know the answer to your question, sorry)