The announcment of the release of v1.0 of Enterprise Library (EntLib) has drawn a lot of attention from many bloggers across the net. If you haven't heard of EntLib before, it is a new release and repackaging of all the existing Application Blocks (Caching, Configuration, Data Access, Cryptography, Exception Handling, Logging and Instrumentation, and Security).
What's exciting about this release of the library is that the patterns & practices group has listened to the feedback from the community and has enhanced all of the blocks in the following ways:
- Added consistency in the API design and configuration of the blocks
- Enhanced documentation and samples to accelerate understanding and adoption
- Reduce inter-dependency between the blocks
- Providing a rich GUI interface to set configuraiton options, rather than manually editing XML files
I first heard about the Enterprise Library back last October at Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Summit in Reston. It was exciting to hear about Microsoft's commitment to supporting the development community and shaping their product direction around the feedback they were receiving, as well as through their partnership with Avanade. Sandy Khaund, the Group Project Manager for the p&p group, encourages the community to get actively involved by visiting and participating in the GotDotNet workspace.
I'm looking forward to installing EntLib and taking it for a test drive right away. Be sure to look for more posts from me and my fellow bloggers here on CodeBetter in the coming days for our impressions and first thoughts. In the meantime, go ahead and download the bits and get your hands dirty--if the success of the original blocks is any indication of what these will look like, then all I can say is wow!
If you're interested in a high-level overview of the blocks, check out this presentation by Tom Hollander given at the last p&p Summit.