Last time I looked at Wheelmud, I decided to have a rest as I was not getting my head around the Subnsonic/Facades approach. The requirements to rebuild DAL and change DB, to add new types/things to the mud, was also not agreeing with how I would like to be expand a mud from a builders perspective.

I have recently been looking at latest version of ado.net in relation to supporting what is left of WinFS. It is looking like most of the cool stuff is going ot be dropped from next release. So I started looking around for existing projects that could offer similar support.

Ideally something something similar to  WinFS (For example,Coffee mud has implemented a Virtual File System where files can be stored in a DB or local file system) which would be a Virtual File System allowing files and metadata to be stored in SQL would great :)

In my search for a dotnet VFS, I did not manage to find what I was looking for. But, I did find NBusiness . This seems to allow for more control than subsonic using an Entity Definition Language known as E# . Has the Facades/Subsonic approach changed much in the last few months ?

Any thoughts on this anyone?

Well, this is the low level stuff that builders will never have to deal with directly. This is for admin/mudlib level coding. I've taken a hiatus from WM as well. I've been focusing on my commercial endeavors lately.

Facades are a design pattern that is very common in MVC (Model-Viewer-Controller) and MVP (Model-Viewer-Presenter) architectures found in a lot of large systems. Ruby on Rails and Castle are the two systems that come to mind.

Facades also fall into one of the missions for WM... that of teaching programming that will increase our value to employers and making us more marketable.

I just posted on this in the General Discussion area.  I was able to sucessfuly decouple the existing BLL and DAL and plug in my domain layer which uses dlinq *formally linq to sql*.  The Asp.Net entity framework leverages dlinq heavily.  I don't really want a tool writing my queries for me so I don't use it and hand tool my dlinq statements and implement my own cascade deletes for normalized structures.  I wrap them into a transaction scope and I am currenlty using thread based storage for the persistent connection (something I'm not found of for dlinq but is pretty much needed unless your bll is litered with checks for stale data).  I am currently not using the facade pattern for my bll, but it could easilly be implemented as such.