Given the following as true...

1. the importance of good software design & architecture, and learning good
habits early on - even right at the beginning of a development career

2. the lack of easily accessible learning materials, tutorials,
walk-throughs etc. for novices (I know there are some but not many) and the
primarily-technical-in-nature Microsoft references for the Application Blocks
(the UIPAB in my case)

3. the application blocks have been around for a while, and have quite a lot
of people eager to learn about them

4. the general comments I've read (this week, at least) from Microsoft
Communities users and others having difficulty finding answers or specific
places to go for help

5. the closest forum in suitability here is the 'dotnet.distributed_apps'
forum but that this would seem to cover topics not necessarily under the
topic of Application Blocks

.... I propose (if I may) that the Application Blocks are given their own
newsgroup (or newsgroups) here at this website so that people have a place
they can go specifically to ask advice from others already using them or
eager to promote them, read solutions that have already been offered by
others who have already faced the same issues, and to also encourage others
to use the ABs more in their programs.

I personally have spent more than a week posting in forums and NGs (with no
reponses) and looking for articles and tutorials that answer my specific
questions on the UIPAB and not really found anything I felt was useful and I
am getting somewhat discouraged. I wouldn't be surprised if people trying out
an AB for the first time are giving up and building their own MVC versions
that are probably not as well designed as they could have been if the UIPAB
was used. It would be great to have a dedicated newsgroup/forum to go and get
help, particularly when those deadlines are looming!

I don't know how to make this suggestion to Microsoft but if you agree (or
disagree!) please post a reply or mark this post as helpful (web-reader
only) so that maybe someone at Microsoft can make note it.

Thanks very much.

I'd agree, but only if support for the Application Blocks was
reasonable to start off with. The application block code seems to be
amaturish at best. I thought that the configuration block was a great
idea, and that thought was put into it, but within several days of
using realized that no one could have possibly used it for a real
project. For instance, storage providers have to be defined for each
configuration section instead of being defined once and named in your
config sections. Come on folks, at least look at architectures like
log4net... A shame considering how much code was written.

I then thought that maybe it was improved in the 2.0 version of the
EAB, so I downloaded and installed that only to find that there was no
real documentation on what had changed and the configuration block
seemed to have been moved into the core.

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Yes that would be helpful. Perhaps a dedicated newsgroup would bring more
users, more interest, more pressure to improve the blocks.

I since found this forum for Microsoft Application Blocks
<http://forums.asp.net/122/ShowForum.aspx> which, although on asp.net
contains posts about desktop apps too.

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I do seem to be having a lot of problems with the UIPAB 2.0
<http://forums.asp.net/1225126/ShowPost.aspx>, and
<http://forums.asp.net/713774/ShowPost.aspx> which seem related to the fact
that it has not yet been updated for .NET 2.0. I think the patterns team may
have been concentrating on the Composite UI Application Block (which contains
a subset of the UIPAB) but I still think the UIPAB is an important block so
hopefully they will return their attention to it soon. At the moment,
although it fits my needs in many ways, I don't think I can use it in its