What is Cocktail?
Cocktail is the infrastructure you need inside your Silverlight, WPF, and Windows Store line-of-business applications.
Your line of business application needs to query and save database data, model those data as objects with business logic, and present those objects to the end user.
These three fundamental responsibilities are typically addressed in distinct application infrastructure layers, each implemented with a framework dedicated to the unique purpose and requirements of that layer.
Where do you get those frameworks? Do you write your own? If not, how do you choose from among the many offerings and how do you make them collaborate with any reasonable assurance of success?
Cocktail is a blend of three popular frameworks, each targeting one of the layers:
Presentation in MVVM style.
DevForce
Entity Model, business logic, and persistence over the web.
Entity Framework
Data access and object-relational mapping (ORM).
It’s a simple formula: Caliburn.Micro + DevForce + Entity Framework.
We’ve had great success with Cocktail on our professional services projects and so have customers who have developed with it independently. This particular mix of frameworks satisfies the design, architectural, and capability goals we favor in our practice.