This might be interesting for all the architects that want to do things structurally. Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 is ready to download, basic description goes like this:
“Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges (such as logging, validation, caching, exception handling, and many others). Application blocks encapsulate Microsoft recommended development practices; they are provided as source code plus tests and documentation that can be used "as is," extended, or modified. “
The new features include the following:
- 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:
- 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 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
- A reduction of the number of assemblies
So probably a wise decision to check out what has been handed out to us from our patterns&practices team!