VS Live!, San Francisco, CA - March 27, 2007 - IdeaBlade, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise application development tools and components for the Microsoft .NET Framework, today announced version 3.5 of its flagship DevForce product. The new version features a powerful business rules validation engine.

 

"Business rule validation is a major issue for developers of sophisticated enterprise applications," said Albert Wang, CEO of IdeaBlade. "Many of our customers are looking for a better way to define and maintain validation rules at the business object level so they can ensure consistent behavior and data integrity across the application. This new engine is a direct response to customer demand and reflects the high architectural standard .NET Framework developers have come to expect from IdeaBlade."

 

Powerful Rules Validation

The DevForce 3.5 Verification Engine is a validation mechanism that is both easy to use and capable of handling sophisticated scenarios. The developer can:

• Apply rules to validate any kind of object. The developer can draw upon pre-defined rules (required value, range check, field length) or write custom rules of any complexity, including rules that compare multiple fields and span multiple objects.
• Trigger validity checking at any time such as upon display, before save, or when setting properties. The engine can fire "pre-set" to block critically errant data from entering the object or fire "post-set" to accommodate temporarily invalid values.
• Display a localized message in the UI without special programming. Each rule returns a rich, extensible object so the developer can deliver a custom response to a successful, errant, or suspicious result.
• Inject validity checking into the business objects automatically via the DevForce Object Mapper.
• Discover rules in the code or retrieve them at runtime from a central store. The engine automatically discovers rules based on attributes in the code and can acquire rules defined externally such as from an XML file or a database.
• Inspect and intervene as the engine validates. The application can monitor the engine's progress and interrupt, modify, or terminate a validation run at any point.

"IdeaBlade's technology provides .NET Framework developers with extended .NET functionality in a meaningful way for enterprise and ISV developers," said Thom Robbins, director of .NET Platform Product Management at Microsoft Corp.  "With DevForce 3.5, .NET developers will be able to rapidly build SOA and web services-based .NET Framework applications that handle business rule validation smoothly and in a highly reusable manner."

"We have reviewed IdeaBlade's approach to business rules validation and we are impressed," said Chuck Miller, systems architect at Applied Technology Mentors, a .NET consultant. "Validation is difficult to achieve consistently and with all of the changes in .NET applications it's particularly important that such a full-fledged, well-conceived solution is at hand to enable us to continue to deliver powerful and easy-to-use solutions for our customers.  The Verification Engine is both flexible and well-integrated with the DevForce product. We see it fitting in to our WinForm and WebForm development projects."