EFx - On the face of it

Its a pretty exciting time at present for the future of EFx and its toolkit.

We are developing a toolkit for the framework, the one piece that has been missing for some time. What's really exciting is the vision that this toolkit delivers. Its a bold one, but extremely powerful.

With this toolkit, we are able to create an entire Service Oriented Enterprise LOB solution that includes many client applications and/or services. We will be drawing the applications on diagrams and using recipes to create all the necessary project artefacts required by the solution. It is possible to draw a whole layered system from Service Interface through to the Data Access classes on a single diagram. The diagram models the interaction of the method calls between the layers and any programming requirements of the method calls (sequencing, transactions, authorisation, entity mapping, aggregation etc).

The diagram will generate the underlying code, and allow extension points for the developer to customise that code, to add finer granularity. Of course the code will be leveraging features of the underlying framework, and therefore all infrastructural services of Enterprise Library and extensions to that. The wizards will allow the developer to define the format of method calls without having to write the code. Its kind of like: coding by policy.