It must be hard to be a developer and not having heard about the Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles. Yesterday and today were amazing and a lot of interesting stuff was announced and demonstrated:

Windows Azure - the operating system in the cloud. I like the links Steve Clayton has gathered http://blogs.msdn.com/stevecla01/archive/2008/10/28/an-azure-grab-bag.aspx

Live Mesh - a part of live services that can be used to store data and contacts in the cloud and to share them amongst your devices. https://developer.mesh-ctp.com/Welcome/default.aspx

Office Web Applications - Your favorite application web-enabled http://blogs.msdn.com/mikewalker/archive/2008/10/28/office-web-applications.aspx

And lots of more stuff like mounting .vhd files in Windows 7, creating great reports in VSTS2010, creating textual DSLs in Oslo, etc. If I would have to summarize it, it would be the photo below which I took during yesterday's keynote. This image underlines the Microsoft message of Software + Services again: You can choose whether you want your app (or parts of it) in the cloud or not.

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)

Two fellow Avanauts, Gerben van Loon and David Slot, released a very cool solution today:

Check it out at: http://www.codeplex.com/EntLibExtensionsWSSF and tell us what you think.

What is it?
Entlib Extensions to WSSF (Web Service Software Factory) is an extension that enables WSSF to easily integrate with Enterprise Library. This extension allows you to very easily handle cross cutting concerns in WCF services like Validation, Exception Handling and Logging without much programming. The extension accomplishes this by using the policy injection application block of enterprise library.

Why are we releasing this?
For the current version of the .NET Framework, Microsoft is offering WSSF and Avanade is offering a similar service factory within ACA.NET. WSSF is an interesting guidance architecture with a lot of developers interested in it and quite a number of organizations have adopted it. Because Microsoft left out EntLib support for WSSF Avanade thought it wise to share an EntLib extension asset for WSSF.

What’s the difference between ACA.NET and WSSF?
Microsoft is offering WSSF and Avanade is offering a similar service factory within ACA.NET. The differences are:

ACA.NET is a multi-tier application factory where WSSF is only focused on the service layer. ACA.NET adds a UI DSL for OLTP web applications and it can also fully generate the data access layer and database.

ACA.NET is more focused on productivity gains. It has features like auto proxy generation and refresh.

ACA.NET is more geared towards large (enterprise) projects:

The designers support different scaling scenario’s then WSSF: models show less details and it supports cross model datacontracts;

Has Entlib integration out of the box;

It’s able to generate service facades, non http services (tcp, named pipe, msmq) and WCF Transaction settings;

It has extensive training material available;

It’s supported by Avanade.