Enterprise Library

Microsoft’s Enterprise Library provides a set of tools that can add powerful features to your applications and reduce your workload. Read this .NET article to take a closer look at the Enterprise Library.While the .NET platform provides a powerful set of tools and libraries to build robust applications, I am always amazed by the additional free add-ons provided by Microsoft. In my opinion, the most notable is the Enterprise Library. This set of application blocks developed by the patterns and practices group utilizes best practices for solving common problems. The result is less development time and subsequent costs. In this week’s column, we take a closer look at the Enterprise Library.

Overview

This is Microsoft’s follow-up to its initial offering of the individual components contained in the Enterprise Library. The previous incarnations were designed as well as released separately. The problem with this approach was that each application block included its own code for tasks common across all application blocks. This redundancy has been resolved with the Enterprise Library. It brings each application block together into a cohesive unit. Each application block uses similar design patterns as well as sharing deployment and configuration requirements. It includes the following seven application blocks:

• Caching: Allows developers to incorporate a local cache in their applications.
• Configuration: Allows applications to read and write configuration information.
• Cryptography: Allows developers to include encryption and hashing functionality in their applications.
• Data Access: Allows developers to incorporate standard database functionality in their applications.
• Exception Handling: Allows developers and policy makers to create a consistent strategy for processing exceptions that occur throughout the architectural layers of enterprise applications.
• Logging and Instrumentation: Allows developers to incorporate standard logging and instrumentation functionality in their applications.
• Security: Allows developers to incorporate security functionality in their applications. Applications can use it in a variety of situations, such as authenticating and authorizing users against a database, retrieving role and profile information, and caching user profile information.

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The Enterprise Library is downloaded in a single self-installing executable. Therefore, you can install and compile the library with one click of your mouse. The result includes the library components as well as a slew of QuickStarts that include samples that clearly demonstrate each application block’s usage. It is a great way to get a better idea of how or where to use them.

In addition, each application block utilizes instrumentation through performance counters, event log entries, and WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) events so you can easily monitor an application as well as diagnose possible problems.

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