The gang and I thought that it would be very fitting to make the first post on the blog the road map. We hope that this road map will be a conversation starter in the group. We also hope this will give a clearer picture to the end users as to the direction the project is going.
S#arp Architecture 2.0
This release is going to be HUGE! Before we lay out the road map, I want to point out that with the 2.0 release, we have changed our mission statement from "Architectural foundation for building maintainable web applications with ASP.NET MVC" to "Architectural foundation for building maintainable applications". While this seems like a small change, we think it is significant. What does this mean to you, the end user? It means we are going to focus on where we think S# really shines, the service (tasks) layer and below. It also means we are going to have better sample applications that showcase using S# in many different types of applications. While we are going to keep Northwind and Who Can Help Me, we are going to add a third sample, one that is more of a real world sample. More on that later.
GitHub changes
Since GitHub now supports organizations, we've created an organization for S#arp Architecture and moved all the code to it. You can find the new repositories here. One of the first things you will notice is that there are more repositories. The repositories consist of:
- Sharp-Architecture-Build - Our new common build system for the project
- Who-Can-Help-Me - The Who Can Help Me sample application
- Sharp-Architecture - The source code for S#arp Architecture
- Northwind - The Northwind sample application
- SharpArch.Futures - Common items we find ourselves adding to our projects
- Sharp-Architecture-Contrib - The contrib project
We decided the project was growing in size (not only project members, but source code as well) and it was time we separated it out a bit more. Expect future blog posts from
Jon George on the SharpArch.Futures project. I believe he is planning a small series on the various pieces.
From now on, all code changes will be done against these repositories. All issues should be logged here as well. We will keep the old issues at the Codai repository, but new ones should go here.
Road Map
This is our loose list of items on the 2.0 road map. This list is not set in stone, but we are pretty sure it has everything we want / need.
- New build system based on MSBuild
- New packaging / deployment system
- Upgraded dependencies
- NHibernate 3.0
- Fluent NHibernate 1.1
- Castle 2.5
- Spark as default view engine
- Norm / MongoDB support
- Azure support
- Change validation
- Data Annotations for UI
- Nhibernate.Validator for Model
- BDD specification tests using Machine.Specifications
- Linq Repository + Linq Specifications ala Who Can Help Me
- Introduction of a Command pattern
- Use of MEF to even more loosely couple the layers
- Create a better plugin architecture
- Better documentation
- Upgrade Northwind
- Upgrade Who Can Help Me
- Create third sample application
- Multiple Front ends
- MS MVC with Spark
- Silverlight with Caliburn.Micro
- OpenRasta
- Based on a real world example
- Increased complexity over Who Can Help Me
I am not going to talk about all items on that list as some of them are yet to be completely fleshed out. As we get to them, we will blog about them as well as document their usage. One thing is for sure, we are still going to remain opinionated towards MS ASP.NET MVC, NHibernate, and Fluent NHibernate. Our default templates (packages) will still be oriented towards these, but we are going to provide alternate samples via templates and blog posts (Anyone wanna teach me WCF?). You might have noticed that we have two items already crossed off, these are complete or in beta.
Templates - say bye bye
Let's face it, the template system has served us really well, but unfortunately it has been one of our biggest weaknesses. We have taken up the challenge to replace it with something better and we believe we have succeeded! I would like to introduce you to
Templify. It will now become our default way of providing templates, err, packages. I am not going to go into too much detail as
Howard van Rooijen will be posting more about it soon. I will say, good bye to Visual Studio when you need a new S#arp Architecture solution. This tool will also allow end users to create their own packages as well as share them with others.
Backwards compatibility
S#arp Architecture 2.0 will not be backwards compatible with previous versions, nor will there be an official upgrade path. There will simply be too many changes that could cause problems for us to support. Sorry, but we do feel it is for the betterment of the community as a whole. If members of the community want to step up and provide documentation for an upgrade procedure, we would not be opposed to this.
That is all for now, but please expect more soon.
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