Is .NET WCSF the way to go?

Question

We are in the process of building a web site which would display news headlines and news. It would be a public site to start with but going forward might include portal functionalities like personalized web pages.

The site also needs to build web 2.0 features around the news stories being displayed, and needs to be extensible and highly customizable, allowing the business to change templates in which the stories are defined and use different templates based on business logic etc..

The core business logic is being built using windows work flow and windows communication foundation, we are now looking for UI stack, is WCSF a good choice?

Answer 1

WCSF might be a good choice, but probably for reasons that have nothing to do with the possible feature needs you've listed.

The best things in my opinion that WCSF has going for it is that it's built on the Model-View-Presenter-[Controller] pattern which gives you the separation of concerns between the view and presenter (just like MVC)... BUT at the same time it's not a total paradigm shift from the "Page Control" model that many .net'ers are used to. This means you can still use a lot of third party controls like Telerik or Infragistics pretty much like you did before (much more challenging with MVC).

Because the MVP pattern uses a dependency injection container (ObjectBuilder) and inversion of control you get a pretty nice way to write unit tests without a web context (easy to mock objects). Also the container supports service location, so you can easily write WCSF services that will be shared (and WCF and or the WSSF fit in nicely here).

It's highly modularized from a programatic standpoint and has many extensibility points.

All that being said... it kind of sounds like you're looking for more of a templating, personalization, dynamic framework. You might check out WSS/SharePoint in this case, because it may get you further down the field out of the box.

Answer 2

I use wcsf and I'm very happy with it.

I too want to have the whole template/dynamic content thing. I will be programming it, though.

MVC is too much of a paradigm shift, and will make it difficult to do what I want to do - partly because the framework is still in beta.

Good luck!

Answer 3

We're using WCSF on a new project and so far it is really help us to deliver good quality work very quickly. It has really helped us as we are using SCRUM as agile method. Therefore the flexibility that the Dependency injection pattern provides us is awesome. We had a few grey hairs to start with, namely developers getting buying into the WCSF and getting around thier learning curve but now it's really paying dividends for us

Answer 4

WCSF + (WSSF | WCF) are good platform together. We have positive experiences with WCSF(but I have to say, only in small projects as front-end). AJAX supported.

You find valuable discussions about performance or achitecural ideas on http://websf.codeplex.com/Thread/List.aspx.