>Pertti,
>>
>>Oh, boy... It is a pretty long time, a few years, I must say. I've bought and learned 3 frameworks in the process of trying to learn .NET, so that obscures it a bit. I am taking a .NET framework framework <g> class next week for 4 days. After that I hope to be able to cobble together relatively sophisticated apps relatively quickly for windows, web and web service/smart clients, and once i've done all that, I just might promote myself to an "Advanced .NET developer".
>
>I interpret the above to mean the first 2 frameworks with you at the helm produced only unsatisfactory simple apps. Could go into more detail where the apps were lacking and if you believe your reason to switch has been based on FWK weakness, your laziness to dig deeper in the FWK or just a different view on how things should be done ? And please specifiy the FWK <g>

Thomas,

Actually I have been able to produce good-to-great apps with all three of them, and I am actually using two in parallel now, picking the one best suited for any given job.

I won't name names here, though, because this is not a thorough (or even objective) review and, besides, I don't want to get into flamewars between different FWK camps. However, here are the number one reasons (negatives) why I moved from one to another to another (these are, of course, highly subjective points of view):

- FWK-1 has a (to me) unsatisfactory tech support model, too few people behind it, and seems somehow rather buggy

- FWK-2 makes me work too hard to relate data and add controls to the forms, and it is too Windows & VB.NET -centered in its help and tutorial materials (I have standardized on C#)

- FWK-3 (my top choice) does a lot of work for me and has a lot of options, but is a handful & a half to learn and doesn't provide source code (not that I would know what to do with it, anyways, but who knows when one hits a brick wall with a FWK and has to get down and dirty). This is the one I'm going back to "school" for, in order to learn it from the FWK experts themselves. Hopefully it will fullfill all my dreams (including doing the dishes and washing my car!)...

While I don't consider myself a Lazy Explorer, I do get frustrated when simple things are made obscure and difficult, and when documentation and step-by-step tutorials are inadequate or simply missing. FWK-3 has a huge library of excellent videos, text -based tutorials and reams and reams of sample code, and those have helped me tremendously in coming up to speed with it, despite its depth and complexity. It also provides a great disconnected app facility, which for some of my apps is mission critical.

Pertti