Welcome changes!
01 Sep 2012 » Giacomo TesioHi guys! We are ready to announce a few changes in the Epic’s directions.
First, we moved to .NET 4. I’d have liked to stick to 3.5 but we would have need to backport some framework’s classes that we want to use. And, BTW, variant generic interfaces are so cool! In the process we updated the documentation, adding the long-awaited API reference.
But this is neither the only nor the major change that we did.
We completely refactored the Epic.Linq project by splitting it into two new projects: Epic.Query and Epic.Query.Linq. In Epic.Query you find the relational algebra and the plumbing for all the query systems that Epic will support. On the other hand, Epic.Query.Linq becomes the Epic framework for Linq based repositories.
However we are working on an alternative to Linq too: Epic.Query.Object.
The idea of a Specification-based QueryObject is not original but we tried it in
a real world application where an important requirement of the domain model
was to track the searches that the user did during a his own activity down to the
in the orders they sent.
Such searches had an important role in the domain consistency: they were
customer needs to satisfy.
Finally, we introduced a brand-new module in Epic, the Prelude. Epic.Prelude contains a set of general purpose models and tools borrowed from both mathematics and experience. We consider them so general and well written that there’s no reason to write your own. Thus, if you are using Epic for your application, you can decide to adopt it also as a foundational domain (note that the Epic.NET’s licence still applies).
This is a major philosophical change in the Epic’s vision, because we provide a set of models that you can depend on. However a bit of pragmatism moved this choice.