A project can only be as good as its foundation. If a house foundation is shaky, it doesn't matter how great the design is above ground. At every step, builders will have to deal with issues created by bad foundation.
Microsoft recently came with an excellent attempt at a foundation – .NET 2.0 and VS 2005. It tries to do everything, and succeeds in most cases. By writing a framework on top of .NET 2.0 I will try to fill the gaps in the specific area that I spend most of my development time: N-tier web applications.
My RAD framework is based on .NET 2.0 and Sql Server 2005. When I am finished I will make the framework open to the public, because I think that's the best way to improve it quickly.
The framework will consist of three major pieces:
XLib — base API for DataAccess, IO Access, Business Logic, etc…
XCodeGenerator — for generating classes and web pages from database tables
XWebSiteTemplate — generic modules for building the sites:
* User Manager
* Content Manager
* Email Manager
* …
Right now I am half of the way through the XLib, so there is plenty of work to do.
