This morning I woke up to Tom's announcement on the new EntLib Contrib release. No big surprises for me personally, since we have been working on this release together for quite some while. Tom actually picked up where I left it, when I went to sleep (and Tom woke up and got to work). Hooray for redundancy across time zones!

On the project homepage you can find a list of all extensions, in this post you find 5 reasons to go and download it now!

Reason #1: You have a need to translate SQL Server error codes (2601 - Primary Key violation, 547 Foreign Key violation, etc.) to .NET Exceptions.

The SqlException Wrap Handler can do this job for you!

Reason #2: Every once in a while you are annoyed by Enterprise Libraries configuration console, since it's Type Selector doesn't work well when hosted inside Visual Studio.

We fixed this in the Lightweight Type Selector!

Reason #3: You've been having runtime exceptions or other issues when using the Validation Application Block, because you simply didn't test your validators using all possibly inputs or cultures.

You can now play around and test your validators, using the Test Command for Validation Rules!

Reason #4: You need more general purpose validation rules to go with the Validation Application Block. Such as (personal favorite) the ExternallyConfigurableObjectValidator (which allows for nested validation and configuration in a file other than web.config or app.config).

Check out these validators!

Reason #5: You need more Policy Injection Call Handlers for the Policy Injection Application Block. Allow me to introduce you to: CursorCallHandler, OneWayCallHandler, SynchronizedCallHandler, ThreadSafeCallHandler, TransactionScopeCallHandler.

(these are unfortunately not documented on the wiki yet, but browsing through the discussions page might help you get an idea on what these are all about)

oh, and reason #6 is that it contains all the previous release contained!

meanwhile even more contributors joined to project and are willing to share their extensions with every single one of us. Yay!