Today telerik a major UI Component vendor announced to acquire Vanatec...

As I recognize Vanatec Open ORM is at least close to LLBLgen technology I would suggest the joint venture will give it significant growth for their install base. Frans what do say?

Nowadays software vendors try to find answers to find their niche in the MS software components market. For telerik its seems to be the logical step to integrate a lower tier cause MS promised to deliver 100s of controls for their silverlight platform leaving not much room for 3rd party components in the UI space.

On the other hand Solution Design announced to support EF and NHibernate in the future..

Its just a thought but wouldn't it be nice to look into the UI space for a closer Integration with certain vendors?

What are your thought?

adrianporger wrote:

Today telerik a major UI Component vendor announced to acquire Vanatec...

Yes I read it too.

As I recognize Vanatec Open ORM is at least close to LLBLgen technology I would suggest the joint venture will give it significant growth for their install base. Frans what do say?

OpenAccess is really end of life. I have no idea what telerik wants with it, other than perhaps take a stab at DevExpress, their closest competitor, which has XPO and an XPO based app-framework.

The end-of-life remark about open access is based on my feeling that an O/R mapper today in the .NET landscape needs a full, rock-solid Linq implementation without compromises (openaccess' linq implementation is very weak, as in: too simple to mention), and has to have a solid vision about what to do about what MS offers.

Open Access is actually just a framework for data-access, though that's not enough to survive: nhibernate will in the end have all the features you'll need in a _ runtime framework_ and Microsoft will give away their framework(s) for free as well. So to survive you need to have a business plan which doesn't rely on a framework or runtime. The offering of a framework has to be there, and has to have enough features, but also you have to offer much more to be interesting for customers to pay money for your offering. Open Access and other framework-based o/r mappers won't match that picture.

LLBLGen Pro has that extra: its designer and state-of-the-art codegeneration framework. As I said in the recently released podcast of Dotnetrocks: back when the EF's plans were opened to the public, we decided what to do next: what to do about it to survive. We understood that a framework alone wouldn't be enough, the core asset would be a next-generation designer, combined with a great code generation framework, which supports not only our own framework (which we'll keep on supporting, also with new features in v3 like value types and more) but also the frameworks of our competitors like EF and nhibernate. A framework based o/r mapper can't do that, we can.

So I don't think telerik wants to step into the O/R mapper business, why should they , the main thing I think they'll do is release a competitor to DevExpress' app framework built on their own UI controls and o/r core (open access).

Nowadays software vendors try to find answers to find their niche in the MS software components market. For telerik its seems to be the logical step to integrate a lower tier cause MS promised to deliver 100s of controls for their silverlight platform leaving not much room for 3rd party components in the UI space.

I still think silverlight will be dead in a couple of years: with the economic downfall on the horizon, it's clear that companies want to invest in proven technology which can be delivered promptly by specialists who have years of experience: Silverlight isn't the platform which has a large following of these kind of specialists, adobe's platforms do.

On the other hand Solution Design announced to support EF and NHibernate in the future..

Yes . And I'm sure that once we've released v3, other o/r mapper vendors will ask us to build support for their framework as well, as I think our v3 designer will be THE designer to use for everything O/R mapping related, and the user (developer) of it is free to pick the target platform of choice, be it our own feature-rich platform, or some other platform, that's transparent.

Its just a thought but wouldn't it be nice to look into the UI space for a closer Integration with certain vendors? What are your thought?

The UI business is of course a tough market with large players and not really a top 'dog' in the market. If a UI vendor wants to build a complete app-framework, it needs a data-access component. Infragistics has the ex-lead developer of DeKlarit working for it (so I suspect he's working on something similar), DevExpress has XPO and its own framework and telerik apparently will do something too.

I think there's room for app-frameworks, but I also think that's a market where serious software engineering will never be a top choice anyway. Projects where the software is written according to requirements etc. etc. (using whatever methodology you'd like) will opt for a serious data-access solution which is build solely for data-access and entity management, which isn't build to serve an app-framework: they'll choose a framework which is build to serve any layer of code placed on top of it, not just the layer of code build around components sold by the same vendor.

Hey, Frans. It's an interesting comment about Silverlight. It makes sense, except that I think that it only applies to the design side of the equation. Meaning, there aren't that many LOB programmers who are Flash designers. If a dev shop is going to pick their next generation platform, I think they're going to go with what they're familiar with, i.e., MS tools and the in-house language expertise and sub out the design work. Plus, Microsoft makes it easy to do the design work in Illustrator et al and export to XAML.

That being said, the argument may still apply just in a different way. It may be that the whole RIA movement may be put on hold while new capital projects slow down and new business is curtailed. In that case it's good old WinForms and HTML...

Jeff...

jeffreygg wrote:

Hey, Frans. It's an interesting comment about Silverlight. It makes sense, except that I think that it only applies to the design side of the equation. Meaning, there aren't that many LOB programmers who are Flash designers. If a dev shop is going to pick their next generation platform, I think they're going to go with what they're familiar with, i.e., MS tools and the in-house language expertise and sub out the design work. Plus, Microsoft makes it easy to do the design work in Illustrator et al and export to XAML.

I think the main focus of MS with respect to UI's is that professional designers should do that (hence their designer line of tools (which are a total failure IMHO)), as 'developers' are seen to be unable to come up with anything remotely useable .

So if dev teams use flash is mostly coming from the fact that the people who have to do the UI etc. are designers and know flash way better than silverlight. (and I think that will stay, why would a designer learn yet another framework? It's not as if we developers learn Java as well in full just in case )

That being said, the argument may still apply just in a different way. It may be that the whole RIA movement may be put on hold while new capital projects slow down and new business is curtailed. In that case it's good old WinForms and HTML... Jeff...

I agree .

Ah, I miss our old banter...

I could be wrong here, but I think that the vast majority of corporations are going to initiate new projects out of their software departments. My bet is that these departments have very few, if any, UI designers. These guys, if given a mandate, are going to initiate new projects using the most familiar technologies, and I think that's a strong motivator for C#/.NET over ActionScript/AIR.

I don't think the designers are going to be the ones corporate looks to to solve new business problems.

I think the same applies for dev shops and consultants. The only place where I think you could be right is software companies producing products, and even then they still have an existing talent pool that most likely doesn't include designers. However, when they go to look for them, you're right; they most likely will find more Flash designers than XAML.

Jeff...