Blaine and I have both blogged about the release we just posted here on the SCSF CodePlex site.

• SCSF April 2008 Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 Published to CodePlex
• Smart Client Software Factory April 2008 Alpha Available

From Blaine's post:

The new features include:

• The April 2008 release of the Smart Client Software Factory includes support for Visual Studio 2008. This release does not support Visual Studio 2005.
• We fixed a few bugs that were identified by the community.
• Requires Guidance Automation Extensions 1.4.
• April 2008 Guidance Package can run side-by-side with the May 2007 Guidance Package.

Known Issues include:

• If the SCSF source is installed on the default path, compiling Quickstarts.WPFIntegration.sln will fail with path too long error.
• If the SCSF source is installed on the default path, compiling GuidancePackage.sln will fail with path too long error.
• Unit tests of CompositeUI.WPF.Tests project (in CompositeUI-WPFExtensions.sln) will fail when executed under debug mode.

Warning

This is an Alpha. We did a minimal amount of testing ("It compiles and links." -- "Good enough. Ship it"), and the computer we installed it on still boots, still runs VS, and seems ok. Use at your own risk.

Download it from here: Smart Client Software Factory April 2008 Alpha

Installed and worked flawlessly in my Vista Ultimate / Visual Studio 2008 Team System development environment! Will be so nice to have all of my apps on one platform (VS2008).

Congrats to the team! Your hard work is deeply appreciated :)

Installed here and also ready to roll. You guys rock!

The best answers I can give are "Soon" and "When it is done".
The docs are pretty much done, we are currently playing whack-a-bug, there are not many open bugs left, and our test team is not finding new issues.
I could give you my guess at a date, but I would rather not, just in case a new issue comes up and makes me a liar. Especially considering that someone had blogged that we would ship in February, and we did not have a team spun up until after that time had past.

Michael Puleio - patterns & practices
Web – http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/
Blog – http://blogs.msdn.com/mpuleio/.

Hi Brendan,

My understanding, from reading messages in this forum and blogs associated with SCSF, is that outside of fixing bugs (reported by the community) that SCSF hasn't really changed and that the goals were to get Guidance package support in VS2008 working and the docs upgraded.

We have had great success with May 2007 (measured by the fact that the team was new to C# and SCSF and completed the project on schedule) and now with the bugs fixed, i.e., View disposal, I suspect April 2008 is far more "predictable"; I'd stay stable but SCSF was already stable - just unpredictable because a few things didn't work as you expected.

I've made a VS2008 copy of our solution (I found VS2005/2008 can share projects) and as long as the recipes are functional I can put VS2005 behind us. I'm grateful (to the SCSF team) to be working out of a single development environment - particularly since we've moved on to our next project which is utilizing WCSF on 2008.

As I mentioned most of the thing I'd like are related to logging, and all of the ones that I'd consider must haves are:
- The filter property (hopefully it will now let me use Logger.ShouldLog to check if a message will actually be written)
- Log filename support for environment variable (I've got something that works now but it's a big kludge)
- RollInterval of Midnight

No I wouldn't abandon it. It just would prevent my from moving other stuff to EntLib4. I only want to have one version of EntLib that we use though out our system. Some of our stuff uses SCSF and CAB, some does not, but as we are jumping between different parts I don't want to have to deal with minor differences and shipping mutliple versions.

-Michael O. Schoneman