.NET Enterprise Library v2.0

Last week, the Patterns & Practices team released v2.0 of Enterprise Library – a library of application blocks designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Application blocks are a type of guidance, provided as source code that can be used “as is”, extended or modified by developers to use on enterprise development projects. This release includes six application blocks (Caching, Cryptography, Data Access, Exception Handling, Logging and Security). Enterprise Library has been redesigned to use the new capabilities of .NET Framework 2.0.

Highlights of this release include:

  • support for new features in VS 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0
  • improvements based on customer feedback including configurable instrumentation, improvements to the flexibility and performance of the logging application block, and support for more database types through the data access application block
  • make developers more productive by simplifying and accelerating common development scenarios

The original releases of Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 1.1 has been an unprecedented hit with developers. One year and 200,000 downloads later, it’s been used in countless customer applications, partner offerings and ISV applications. Many internal Microsoft applications use it. The Enterprise Library Community now has over 15,000 members sharing questions, answers and code samples around their experiences using Enterprise Library. Thanks to the community members who have played an important role in the development of this release by providing the requirements and feedback on CTP builds.

 

Like the previous releases of Enterprise Library, the new .NET Framework 2.0 release is implemented in C#. However Enterprise Library is great to use from any .NET language, and all documentation and sample applications are provided in both VB.NET and C# and it is possible to extend the library from either language. In addition, the patterns & practices team plans to provide end-to-end reference applications demonstrating the use of Enterprise Library from both VB.NET and C#.

Namaste!