03 May 2010
CSLA 4 Beta 1 is now available for download. This includes CSLA .NET version 4 for .NET and Silverlight.
Beta 1 is essentially feature complete. It includes some really big (breaking) changes from 3.8.
Here’s a list of highlights, and of course the change log lists essentially all the changes (with the breaking changes highlighted).
The biggest change is the new business, validation and authorization rules system (info here, here and here). While the new rule system requires changes to your existing business, validation and authorization rules code, the new capabilities are pretty amazing and I think you’ll find it is worth the effort to make the changes.
There are many other changes as well, touching almost every aspect of the framework. From new ASP.NET MVC support, to enhanced MVVM support in Silverlight and WPF, to addressing many of the most common requests around the data portal, CSLA 4 should offer benefits to most application scenarios.
This is a beta 1 release, and is the start of the overall beta-to-release process. Based on your feedback using this beta, I expect to do a couple more beta releases over the next few weeks, with a final release in about 6-8 weeks (so around the end of June).
While I’m sure there will be changes based on feedback, the focus during the beta process is on fixing bugs or addressing anything that is clearly broken. I do not anticipate any major feature changes or enhancements during this process – that’s what the past few months of pre-releases were all about.
CSLA 4 does require .NET 4 and (optionally) Silverlight 4. It also requires Visual Studio 2010. If you are using older versions of Visual Studio, .NET or Silverlight then you should continue to use version 3.8.
Please download CSLA 4 Beta 1 and offer bug reports or other feedback using the CSLA forum.