Microsoft Enterprise Library is a popular collection of reusable software components (called application blocks) designed to address common cross-cutting concerns of enterprise application developers (such as logging, validation, data access, exception handling, and more). Entlib is provided as source code, test cases, and documentation that can be used "as is" or extended, and encapsulates the Microsoft recommended and proven practices for .NET application development.

We’re currently planning the next release of Enterprise Library and would love your feedback on what features are important to you and your customers. Please review our preliminary backlog, and vote.

Goals for Enterprise Library

Enterprise Library is intended for use by developers who build complex, enterprise-level applications. Enterprise Library is used when building applications that typically will be deployed widely and need to interoperate with other applications and systems. In addition, they generally have strict security, reliability, and performance requirements. The goals of Enterprise Library are the following:

Consistency. All Enterprise Library application blocks feature consistent design patterns and implementation approaches.

Extensibility. All application blocks include defined extensibility points that allow developers to customize the behavior of the application blocks by adding their own code.

Ease of use. Enterprise Library offers numerous usability improvements, including a configuration tool, powerful programmatic configuration support, intuitive interfaces, a simpler installation procedure that allows you to select only those application blocks you desire, and clear documentation, samples and hands-on labs.

Integration. Enterprise Library application blocks are designed to work well together or individually.

What’s New in v5.0?

This major release of Enterprise Library contains many compelling new features and updates that will make developers more productive. There are no new blocks; instead the team focused on making the existing blocks shine, on testability, maintainability and learnability. The new features include:

• Major architectural refactoring that provides improved testability and maintainability through full support of the dependency injection style of development
• Dependency injection container independence (Unity ships with Enterprise Library, but you can replace Unity with a container of your choice)
• Programmatic configuration support, including a fluent configuration interface and an XSD schema to enable IntelliSense
• Redesign of the configuration tool to provide:

1. A more usable and intuitive look and feel
2. Extensibility improvements through meta-data driven configuration visualizations that replace the requirement to write design time code
3. A wizard framework that can help to simplify complex configuration tasks

• Data accessors for more intuitive processing of data query results
• Asynchronous data access support
• Honoring validation attributes between Validation Application Block attributes and DataAnnotations
• Integration with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) validation mechanisms
• Support for complex configuration scenarios, including additive merge from multiple configuration sources and hierarchical merge
• Optimized cache scavenging
• Better performance when logging
• Support for the .NET 4.0 Framework and integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010

Improvements to Unity

1. Streamlined configuration schema
2. A simplified API for static factories and interception
3. The capability to add interface implementation through interception
4. Additional types of lifetime manager
5. Deferred resolution (automatic factories)

A reduction of the number of assemblies

The detailed list of all changes is included in the Enterprise Library documentation and also online.

Backward Compatibility

The Enterprise Library team tried its utmost to preserve the existing Enterprise Library APIs (v3.1 and higher). However, due to the redesign of the internals and the .NET Framework roadmap moving forward, there are some breaking changes. A full list is available here.

Getting Started

If you are new to Enterprise Library:

• read the Introduction to the Enterprise Library section of the documentation
• read and review examples from the Developer’s Guide
• download, compile and run the source code – study the code and the tests;
• practice the Hands-On Labs (the updated set of labs to be released by the end of April);
• watch the videos;
• see what others say about Enterprise Library

If you already know and love Enterprise Library:

• check out the change log for this release;
• upgrade to v5.0 – to help you with this task, we’ve written the Migration Guide;
• practice the updated Hands-On Labs (the updated set of labs to be released by the end of April);
• watch the videos;
• see what others say about Enterprise Library

Providing Feedback

We would appreciate feedback on any issues found, or any other general comments on this release.

To report a bug, use online Issue Tracker. Other feedback or questions can be posted on the Enterprise Library Codeplex forum. Internal DL: entlib

We are looking for success stories. If you have a customer who adopts Enterprise Library 5.0 and would like to share their story either internally or even as a public case study, please let the Enterprise Library producer (gmelnik) know. Also, if you are adopting Enterprise Library on your Microsoft project, please let us know – share your experience, join our advisory board, help us drive the next great release of the Enterprise Library.

Support

Community support is provided via Enterprise Library Codeplex forum.

Internally, you may also use the DL: entlib.

Customers can obtain support through Microsoft Premier Support Services for a fee, but the code is considered user-written by Microsoft support staff.

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