Enterprise Library : coming very soon!

In the coming days, the next generation of the patterns & practices Application Blocks will be released : Enterprise Library. All blocks will be delivered into 1 integrated package.

The Enterprise Library will offer the following advantages (click here for more details).

• Consistency : all blocks look and behave similarly
• Extensibility : customize and extend blocks
• Ease of use : GUI-based configuration editing tool
• Integration : all blocks work together

Usually I don't like to use code that is wrapped up into separate objects ... Especially if these objects cannot be modified (black box). Code blocks are frequently used to speed up development without knowing what's really going on inside, but my opinion is that it is also very important to know what exactly happens inside. If something goes wrong, you always should be able to fix the problem(s) and so you have to be in charge of the code. Speeding up the development phase with the use of code blocks doesn't automatically mean that performance will be improved (be careful with that assumption). Code-generators are also very tricky because they can create a lot of garbage and debugging generated code can be very annoying ...

Having said that, I really look forward to take a closer look at the Enterprise Library. In the past I've worked already with some blocks (Data Access, Logging [Enterprise Instrumentation Framework], UIP) and they were quite useful, but configuration (xml-files) was not always straightforward. At the MSDN event "Unleashing the Potential of the Microsoft Platform" at the end of 2004, Rudi and David gave a sneak preview of EntLib where could be seen that a lot of work was done to prevent the configuration-troubles, but we still have to wait a little bit to see this in action. Also the integration and consistency of all blocks will be an asset. I believe that EntLib will give developers a lot of extra possibilities from scratch, without having coded one single line of code - it can act as an out-of-the-box start-solution.