Intro to CAB
When Acropolis was announced, quite a few people I chatted with in e-mail and on message boards seemed to want to move away from CAB because they were afraid it would no longer be “maintained” or built upon. Fortunately, the SCSF Contrib Project has been busy steadily adding code and features to CAB. I haven’t had a chance to blog about much of the additions lately (or contribute myself, even though I have plans to add my UIService and WizardWorkspace to the code base), but I have taken notice of a few cool blog posts.
For starters, Rich Newman has put together a pretty darn nice looking Intro to CAB. It is one of the best point-by-point introductions to the CAB framework that I have seen (if a bit lengthy). Rich does a nice job of separating out some of the patterns and ideas (Command, Dependency Injection) from the way CAB implements them. So, if you’re new to the concepts as well as the framework (which many developers are) then you get to digest both the theory and the implementation as separate chunks, which I think is very valuable if you’re trying to learn this stuff for the first time. I highly recommend his site for people new to CAB.
ActionCatalog
The other really cool thing I saw in the last week or so is Bil Simser’s post on Taming the ActionCatalog in SCSF. The ActionCatalog has been a point of confusion for many developers. Here, though, Bil makes everything very clear with a concise explanation and some great code samples. It becomes really easy to see how one would go about utilizing this service to perform role-based UI configuration in a much less intrusive way.
I know for myself, I can’t wait to make use of what Bil outlines. In the application I’m currently working on, we have to do some role-based, permission-based UI configuration. But up to now, because of the limited amount of configuration we’ve had to do, we’ve done it the quick-and-dirty way. The ActionCatalog looks a lot better from where I stand.
So there’s some CAB updates to sink your teeth into.