Deliverable: Community

An active community has gathered around the CSLA framework. The community includes some people that are very knowledgeable about CSLA, OO, .Net, and frameworks in general. The community is also very welcoming, and helpful to newbies.

There is a forum which, as of April 2006, reports 3183 current members. It is an active forum. I have registered to receive a daily email summary of any new postings. A typical day consists of about 20 new postings, so questions get regularly answered.

As of May 2006 the forum has a new home as the previous platform had issues. At the point of writing people are still migrating and enrolling into the new forum.

The forum archive is accessible by a content search facility. As of April 2006 there are over 260,000 posts from over 4,700 threads in there, all relating to CSLA thanks to the housekeepers. I have found the answer to all of my questions just by searching the archive.

Rocky is often involved in forum discussions. He seems to have a good open policy of discussing future directions for the framework, seeking feedback. I am sure that the depth of experience, and commitment within the community, is a contributing factor in the framework's depth, breadth, and success.

There have been a couple of notable contributions from community members (see links)

• Chris Denslow has created a CSLA reference web site which acts as an on-line help facility for the framework. Chris has both C# and VB sections in his site.

• Peter Kozul has developed a complementary extension to the framework, which implements Observer and Publish/Subscribe design patterns to strengthen the notification between parents and their children. It also implements his own custom binding allowing applications to validate business rules on a per key stroke basis, rather than at loss of focus as with standard binding.