Following the talk I did at SDC recently I thought about blogging about Enterprise Library.

A bit of history

Microsoft created a team called "Patterns & Practices" to help adoption of .NET in the developer community. This team did great early work on how to create secure, performing, n-tier applications. This work was mostly done on paper, whitepapers and downloadable pdf files, but nothing in code. So the P&P team started building a set of components, called application blocks, to perform data access incorporating Microsoft best practices. Next to the data access there were application blocks for exception handling, logging, user interface navigation, etc. These blocks would handle common application plumbing, allowing developers to focus on business functionality.

Avanade noticed the work Microsoft Patterns & Practices were doing in this field and heard feedback from the field that the blocks should be more uniformly and easier to use. Then Avanade created the first version of Avanade Connected Architectures (ACA), which was a very early version of Enterprise Library. Later Microsoft used ACA to create Enterprise Library themselves since they created the blocks in the first place.

Back to present

In May 2008 version 4 of Enterprise Library was released, containing many more features and advancements since the original application blocks were first bound together. EntLib adoption is very high in the community, especially when you see these numbers. Anyway, let's get started finding Enterprise Library on the web.

Downloading

When you want to get started using Enterprise Library, first you need to download the latest version or the one that matches your application version. In this post I am assuming that you are working with .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008. Click on the image below and you'll be redirected to the actual download page at microsoft.com.

After registering you can download the msi. If you are running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 and have UAC enabled, you want to start the msi file through a command prompt that is running as administrator and enter: msiexec -i "Enterprise Library 4.0 - May 2008.msi".

Click Next, accept the license agreement, click next and another next.

After selecting the options (All) and install location (default) click next and then install. Enterprise Library will be installed on your machine. When the installation is finished it will prompt to ask if you want to install the source of Enterprise Library. You can uncheck the box and do that later (the source installer is located in [install location]\src).

Congratulations! You have just installed 9 application blocks that will make your life as a developer easier and save you a lot of time developing and testing "boring" plumbing code.

Downloads

Enterprise Library 4.0 – May 2008 (for .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008)

Discussion forum

Discussions for patterns & practices – Enterprise Library

Community

patterns & practices community site

Community Extensions

Enterprise Library Contrib

License

Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL)