Jean-Paul Smit

Enterprise Library 5.0 Released!

About 1,5 years after v4.1 a new version of the Enterprise Libary has been released by the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team.

For those who aren’t familiar with Enterprise Library:

“Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable application blocks designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges. This release includes: Caching Application Block, Cryptography Application Block, Data Access Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging Application Block, Policy Injection Application Block, Security Application Block, Validation Application Block, and Unity Application Block.”

This major release of Enterprise Library contains many compelling new features and updates that will make developers more productive. These 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 it 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:
  • A more usable and intuitive look and feel
  • Extensibility improvements through meta-data driven configuration visualizations that replace the requirement to write design time code
  • 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 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
• A reduction of the number of assemblies
• Support for the .NET 4.0 Framework and integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Improvements to Unity

Like bullet point 12 promises: after installation you’ll find there are 27 assemblies in the bin folder, where v4.1 of Enterprise Library contains 45 assemblies.

The assemblies are versioned 5.0.414.0 where v4.1 was versioned 4.1.0.0. Could it be that the starting point of this version was 5.0.0.0 and the daily build made it untill 414?

One other thing that I noticed is the new configuration tool. Like with many new things I guess I have to get to know it before I can really tell. My first impression is that it isn’t as intuitive as it was with v4.1 but  we’ll see.

Version 5.0 can be downloaded here.

If you’re familiar with Enterprise Library then you’ll notice a new color scheme (more orange, that must be inspired by Dutch influences ;-) ) used in this version. If double click “Enterprise Library 5.0.msi”, you’ll pass the following screens.

Installation is finished, at this point you’ll have an entry in your programs menu. You can install the sources as well if you move on.

After this batch file finishes, the Enterprise Library is fully installed.

Published Wed, Apr 21 2010 9:44 PM by Jean-Paul Smit