In case you haven’t seen it – Enterprise Library 3.0 has been released.
There are a ton of new features. Most of these are additive.
- Validation Application Block – this allows you to centralize your validation rules and validate data from anywhere in your application. This means that through config – you can use the exact same validation in your smart client, ASP.NET, server side and so on.
- Policy Injection Application Block – Provides a powerful approach for separating cross-cutting concerns from business logic using declarative policies that are attached at runtime to methods on your objects.
- Application Block Software Factory – Dramatically simplifies the process of building application blocks and providers through the magic of guidance automation.
- Visual Studio-integrated Configuration Editor – great improvements on the config editor and VS.NET integration.
- Environmental Overrides – Use the configuration tool to specify configuration settings that are common or different across multiple environments, and merge this information into configuration files to be deployed with your applications.
- WCF Integration – This is a bigger deal that it seams as we are now able to config the services layer o the Enterprise Libraries to talk to almost anything through Windows Communication Foundation. This has implications on the Logging, Exception Handling and Validation Application Blocks.
- Pre-compiled, strong-named binaries. No need to compile and strong name the code unless you want to manage and evolve the code yourself.
Check out Tom Hollander’s blog for a more compete write-up.