Windows Forms vs. SmartClientContrib

[dpadlewski]

How does the Windows Forms framework compare with the SCC (formally CAB)?

[Mark Pollack]

Hi,

The winforms support is primarily around applying dependency injection and the validation framework to winforms. While there is overlap of concepts with CAB, CAB does offer a more pre-packaged way to build a winform application. Arguably, one can 'build your own CAB' using Spring or other DI frameworks to solve a large part of the problem space. Jeremy Miller's blog (http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2007/07/25/the-build-your-own-cab-series-table-of-contents.aspx) on that this topic is a great reference for that approach.

A fair number of the more complex features in CAB that you would look to a framework to provide are present in Spring, dependency injection, loading and management of separately configuration application components, but Spring doesn't have a comparable eventing subsystem as in CAB. The work that is going on in Spring Integration (a Java project) to create an elegant in-process pub-sub mechanism is a likely candidate for porting into .NET to provide this functionality.

The current plan is to better expose and publicize the winform module by making it part of a larger 'spring extensions' project to grow the community around this project.

Cheers,
Mark