This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Peter G Provost. Original Post: Composite UI Application Block Tech Preview 1 Now Available Feed Title: Peter Provost's Geek Noise Feed URL: /error.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Rss.aspx Feed Description: Technology news, development articles, Microsoft .NET, and other stuff... Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Peter G Provost Latest Posts From Peter Provost's Geek Noise

If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t been posting as much as I used to, it is because I’ve been leading the development of the newest patterns & practices deliverable, the Composite UI Application Block (aka CAB).

What is the CAB?

The Composite UI Application Block – Community Technical Preview is a source code-based component built on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 that provides proven practices to build complex smart client user interfaces. It is based on proven design patterns in which rich and complex user interface solutions can be built out of simpler user interface parts that can be independently developed, tested, versioned and deployed.

It provides guidance on the architecture of your solution leveraging platform features of the .NET Framework including Windows Forms and ClickOnce.

The application block is designed to separate the different parts of software development, enabling each developer or team to concentrate on their area of expertise. For example, business logic, infrastructure components, or user interface components. The application block provides a framework that shell developers can use to link all of these distinct parts of the application together into a loosely-coupled, yet collaborating set of components to create a fully functioning application.

This is the 1.0 Tech Preview release of CAB, and provides a rich foundation for building smart client and Windows Forms applications in .NET 2.0. We will be continuing to expand the developer experience and the capabilities in the coming months, so please get involved by joining the community site if you haven’t already.

I have had the pleasure of working on this block with an amazing team of people:

• Eugenio Pace
• Edward Jezierski
• Brad Wilson
• Daniel Cazzulino
• Juan Carlos Elichirigoity
• John Luif
• Javier Arguello
• Rohit Sharma
• RoAnn Corbisier
• Lin Joyner
• Mohammad Al-Sabt
• William Loeffler
• And many many more who helped along the way…

This is one of the finest teams of developers, architects, testers, writers, program managers and product managers I’ve ever worked with and I want to thank all of them publicly for doing such fine work.

We are targeting a final release at the same time as the Whidbey launch, but we will also be refreshing the code on our community site. Now that we have made our June 30 tech preview launch, I will be blogging a lot more about many of the interesting techniques we are using in CAB. I’m sure the other bloggers on the team (those with links in the list above) will be blogging about it too.

To download the block, please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/cabctp.asp. We just posted that page, so if it isn’t there yet when you try, wait a little while and try again.