What's your opinion on MS CAB (Composite Application Block)?

Question

I'm in the process of evaluating the use of CAB for a new .net 3.5 winform project

I plan to use the Infragistics toolset, which is known to be 'CAB compliant'

While CAB has the immediate upside of letting me focus on my business instead of coding basic docking/login/etc code, I feel like I would be able to achieve the same level of functionnality quite radpidly by myself (with the added flexibility/reactivity bonus you have when you 'own' the code).

I'm seeking some feedback on Microsoft's CAB from people using it :

1. Have you experienced problems/bugs ?
2. Do you feel like CAB saved your time ?
3. Are there extra functionalities I don't know about (beside Docking/Login/WorkerThreads best practices?)

Answer 1

I had some experience using CAB a couple of years ago and my conclusion was that it too complex and had a steep learning curve. As such the benefits it offered just weren't worth the price of getting up to speed with it. However don't take my word for it, try following some of their labs and see what you think.

Jeremy Miller wrote an excellent series of blog posts about building your own CAB

http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2007/07/25/the-build-your-own-cab-series-table-of-contents.aspx

these are worth a look as you could just take from there what you need.

My advice would be to get on with your project rather than build a framework up front. As the project develops you should spot opportunities to refactor code into base classes and effectively harvest a framework from your application.

That way you will end up with a framework that meets your needs, and that everyone on the development team will understand. Whatever you do don't build a framework up front - there lies the path to ruin :-)