ISV Wish List

In the past couple of months we have been working with several ISVs to help them modernize their existing solutions/re-platform the existing application, and after some time a common patter start to emerge across all the ISV requirements - a ISV wish list if you will, which would like to summarize as:

a. Rich metadata driven extensible interface
b. Flexible and highly configurable business processes
c. Support for multiple back ends

In case of a and b (above): ISVs usually have their own professional service group that does the deployment for a new client, traditionally for each customization required by the new client the professional service group would custom develop it, however these ISVs going forward want to leverage a metadata driven approach whereby the UI and validation is dynamically created.

Up until now we have had to custom build many of these capabilities, however now with .NET 3.x several of these challenges can be met using the out of the box capabilities:

a. Rich metadata driven interface : WPF with XAML based declarative approach combined with loose XAML, the new data binding and data templatization model works extremely well for metadata driven solutions, additionally Prism (now WPF composite framework) can be used as the composite application framework container for building a thick client WPF application.

b. Flexible and highly configurable business processes: One stop solution, Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) in .NET 3.x. WF can be used to easily model complex business processes instead of writing large amount of code. Additionally we can leverage XAML activation - whereby the WF can be dynamically build and executed (i.e. dynamically compiled), this provides professional service teams with incredible flexibility to tailor/configure the business process for a given client.

c. Support for multiple back ends: Microsoft Entity Framework currently in CTP provides an entity modeling capability (ORM tool) that abstracts away the underlying DB product. All CRUD operations are performed on the entity data model and the entity framework can translate the CRUD operations to the specifics of the respective DB vendors. Additionally Entity Frameworks works nicely with WCF, all the classes that are generated behind the scene when you create the entity models are created with WCF serialization in mind.

Microsoft also informs us that they too see many ISVs having the same "wish list" and its expected that .NET 4.0 will support more of these capabilities natively.