CSLA .NET version 3.8.0 is now released and is available for download.

• Windows version
• Silverlight version

For Windows Forms and Web Forms users there are not any major new features, but some of the bug fixes may be valuable. Upgrading from 3.7 to 3.8 should be painless for these UI types (as well as XML services and workflow interfaces).

If you use WPF or Silverlight, you will almost certainly want to take a look at the features in 3.8. The downside is that there are several breaking changes in the XAML controls, but the upside is that the new XAML control implementations are far superior to previous versions. Controls impacted include:

• PropertyStatus – now supports a “pull model” so a UI control can bind to properties of PropertyStatus, rather than having PropertyStatus directly manipulate the UI control’s IsReadOnly and IsEnabled properties. Also in Silverlight, PropertyStatus now makes use of the Silverlight 3 binding capabilities.
• InvokeMethod – can now be triggered by any UI event, and can invoke a couple different method signatures on the DataContext. Also, MethodParameter is now bindable. The end result is that InvokeMethod provides really good support for both the CslaDataProvider model and the MVVM design pattern.
• Execute – a new control that is a trigger action that works in the Blend 3 Interactivity model. This is very similar to InvokeMethod, but works with the Blend 3 scheme.
• ViewModelBase<T> – provides a base class to make it easy to build a viewmodel class when using the MVVM pattern.
• ViewModel<T> – provides a base class to make it easy to build a viewmodel class that works with InvokeMethod/Execute when using the MVVM pattern.
• CslaDataProvider – the ObjectInstance property is now bindable, so it is possible to create master-detail (parent-child) relationships in the UI between different data provider controls.

See this blog post for more MVVM information.

Other important or interesting features include:

• Support for System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations validation attributes. This blog post has information about the change.
• A CSLA .NET specific model binder for ASP.NET MVC, enabling the use of CSLA .NET rule methods and DataAnnotation validation attributes in the same object, with the UI displaying combined results.
• Performance enhancements for MobileFormatter, including the use of binary XML. This forum thread has some great comparative information around binary XML and compression.
• Better support for altering the behavior of IsDirty when using managed backing fields. This blog post has good information about using the changes.
• All the samples have been updated to build with 3.8.0, and the MVVMexperiment projects for WPF and Silverlight illustrate most of the new MVVM features.

There are also numerous bug fixes, including a solution to the memory leak issue with BusyAnimation and a null reference issue with LINQ to CSLA. See the change logs for more details about bug fixes.