Sergey,

For one, Kevin was and is very accessible. At the time I made the decision, MM.NET provided localization and security features which was a requirement for a customer I was working for at time and I didn't find any other framework that did those things. As most of my work is asp.net, I appreciated the asp.net features that MM.NET supported. Data binding web forms was simplified (in part, thanks to Rick's contributions to MM.NET). And now, MM.NET saves a lot of coding by generating the business objects from your existing database tables. Of course, there are other products that do these things now.

As Rick mentioned earlier, choosing a framework is going to be largely a matter of personal preference. You will have to try them out for yourself and see what fits your style and needs.

What type of applications do you plan to develop? Will you be developing winform apps? Web apps? Web Services? Reporting? Integration? Some of each?

Actually, it's a lot of fun to check out the tools available. Lot's of neat ideas and approaches in all of them. Happy evaluation!

Regards,
Carl.

>Hi Carl,
>
>What's your opinion about MM.NET? Why did you pick it?
>
>>Sergey, I mainly use MM.NET, but I am working on a CSLA project for a customer since that is what they are comfortable with and they have a considerable amount of "legacy" code developed with CSLA.
>>
>>The out-of-box experience with frameworks can be frustrating for those new to .NET. Why? For one thing it's tempting to look at frameworks as a learning-curve and productivity short-cut for moving to the world of .NET development. Indeed, the learning curve is steep for .NET. But I would also argue that there's a steep learning curve in most development environments. Even VFP can be daunting to someone just starting out learning to use it today. Silly me for thinking I could short-cut learning .NET :) I admit that was my motivation at first. Oh, well. I still had to learn .NET. And that took some time.
>>
>>So, now that I'm at least at a basecamp on the lower reaches of the .NET Mt. Everest learning curve, I find that I can make better use of MM.NET or CSLA - now that I understand .NET better. Making the change from MM.NET (for this one project, MM.NET is still my work horse) to CSLA actually has been fairly painless. I think the reason for that is, I understand .NET much better now than when I first started out. Not to mention that both of these frameworks are well thought out.
>>
>>These comments probably aren't what you were asking for, but it's interesting how often this topic comes up. I keep hoping things will get simpler in software development, but then I guess we would have to find something else to do. I've been intrigued by books like "Beyond Java", all the hoopla around dynamic languages and the like, I guess because while there may be no silver bullet, I can at least dream of one. :)
>>
>>OK, back to CSLA... Mark Dunn (http://www.dunntraining.com/) has a training class in CSLA. I heard good things from attendees of the "beta" class.
>>