Application Frameworks

As you can see, the trend in Data Access is to abstract into higher and higher levels within your applications. As data access libraries are generating entity classes, the question around locating data validation logic can become a slippery slope. If a data access generated entity can validate correct data types, maybe it should also validate that postal codes and phone numbers are of the correct format. Should they also cross-validate postal codes with states/provinces?
Should these error messages be managed inside of my entities? The waters can be muddied quite quickly.
It is therefore worthy to briefly mention a few of the more popular application frameworks that embrace a holistic view of data access in the scope of an application.
CSLA.NET (Component-based Scalable Logical Architecture) is a framework developed principally by author Rocky Lhotka in conjunction with his popularseries of Business Objects books. When first released, CSLA was focused on
Visual Basic 6, but over the years it has remained very current on the latest  Microsoft technologies and is now principally maintained in C# and ported to VB. In CSLA, data is fully encapsulated by rich business objects that manage all behavior including persistence. CSLA facilitates the re-use of business objects in many possible client technologies including ASP.NET, WPF, WinForms, and Silverlight including distributed architectures using Web Services.
DevForce from IdeaBlade is a commercially available framework for building rich, distributed applications in Silverlight, WPF, WinForms, and ASP.NET.
DevForce builds on top of the Entity Framework for its persistence layer and includes a Business Objects server for distributed architectures. DevForce is a popular application framework and has been around since 2001.