MS Application blocks and software factories

For some years now Microsoft has been giving a number of application blocks, for example the Composite UI Application Block (CAB). They also have software factories to make the application blocks easier to use from Visual Studio. One of these factories is the Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF)

It seems like the application blocks is getting more mature these days then before. It has finnally been created a decent whitepaper for the CAB and the SCSF.
It's not written by the same people that wrote the application blocks, something that problably is good.

However, personally I'm still on the sceptic side regarding the usage of these application blocks in real-life applications. Most of the application I have been involved in developing has a quite long expected lifetime, maybe up to 10 years, and several years development time (small team).
If you then look at the history of for example the CAB, you would have needed to do a lot of hard refactoring to follow up the new versions of the CAB and SCSF. At the same time the software factories will have a lot of influence on when and how you handling changes in the development environment, for example the transit from VS 2003 to VS 2005, and now coming up, the transit to Orcha.

My current stand on stuff is that you should be sure you know what you do if you choose to use for example the CAB and SCSF in your projects.

Anders Norås have a great post on the topic, and he recently also included the source code for the example project he is referring to in the blog.
It's recommended reading!