CLSA 3.5 is getting closer to release, with a beta announced this past weekend. CSLA 3.5 will be for .Net 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 only. There is a 3.04 maintenance release which still targets .Net 2.0 that is coming out soon.

Announced earlier today, is a new way to write properties in CSLA, which Rocky refers to as property code reduction. Having worked with CSLA since version 1.0, I see this mainly as a welcome relief. My hesitation is in the fact that Rocky identifies a performance hit when using the fully reduced property declaration code. Adding an additional line which declares the backing variable (member variable, field, etc) alleviates this somewhat. Another way in which code is reduced is in the addition of child property management by CSLA. In the past you needed to override IsValid and IsDirty, and now CSLA handles this for you.

I love less code, truly I do, but I have attempted to implement stuff in the past with the good intention of less code, only to create something that didn't work out so well. Usually this involved an over use of reflection, where code generation would have worked just as well. I'm certainly not trying to compare my code writing skill to Rocky's, but I wonder if this is a case of programmers getting lazy? Well, I use code generation, so I guess that could be considered lazy as well. I guess the best thing to take away from this is, make sure you evaluate and inform your users (which Rocky has) of changes that save you, the programmer time. In the end the customer doesn't care if it took you 5 lines or 10 lines to implement a property, they just want their application to work.