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)

Good news: Today Microsoft announced the next version of Visual Studio Team System, previously known as "Rosario", will be called VSTS 2010. Some good information can be found on in Somasegar's post and in the official press release. In short the message is that Application Lifecycle Management will be taken to the next level to better facilitate architects, testers and project managers, but also new audiences such as application maintenance people. I am sure you know that Microsoft are very open in developing new products and receiving feedback, so you can already enjoy an early "Rosario" build, which is downloadable as a VPC. A new version is expected shortly, which would make sense since the most interesting conferences of all is about to kick-off in 4 weeks...

The Professional Developer Conference was last held in Los Angeles three years ago. Then Microsoft announced The LINQ Project, WinFX including workflow foundation and presentation foundation and the designer toolset we all know now as the Expression suite. This PDC is all about the cloud and Live, which sounds very promising.

Recently I ran into an error installing TFS2008 SP1. The environment is an upgraded TFS2005 install, had been running OK and updates went fine. This update just did not install.

Error 29106.Team Foundation Report Server Configuration: Access to the SQL Reporting Services databases could not be granted. Verify that the Team Foundation data-tier server has enough free disk space.

In the end the solution appeared in the log file, located in C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Local Settings\Temp. The file stated

System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: User, group, or role 'Domain\TFS_AT$' already exists in the current database.

The solution appeared to be to remove the computer account from logins and all databases in SQL Server on the Team Foundation Server Data Tier. After that SP1 created the account again and installed fine.

Wow, that were two impressive days. There are so many ways that partners are extending Visual Studio, it is really inspiring. My presentation was one of two about how to Extend TFS. The conference ended by a bunch of partners getting 4 minutes each to present their solution: T4 Editors, testing and performance tools, game factories, controls, etc.

Are you interesting in VSX, check out this site and this book, that was handed out at the conference.

Today is the first day of the the Visual Studio Extensibility Developer Conference, about which I wrote some time ago.

There are some great sessions about Visual Studio, Shell, DSLs and VSTS, most of which are focused on product developers. This morning Rico Mariano, the Visual Studio Chief Architect, presented the kick off and talked about his pillars for the next Visual Studio versions. While Dev10 is underway, long term planning for Dev11 and Dev12 has already started. In general he said the teams will focus on Visual Studio being extensible (very relevant to this audience), scalable (Rico is a performance guy), modern, connected and frugal. The message was presented with some great anecdotes on the side from his years of experience on related teams since late 80s.

Each next version of Visual Studio should also be good looking, focused on a certain group of end users and obviously support the latest hardware and software.

Good stuff! Session decks are posted here

Last saturday the Dutch code camp was organized by three user groups. There was a good crowd and especially the number of MVPs was impressive. My talk was on Modeling In VSTS Rosario. I demonstrated the publicly available Rosario CTP12 VPC in which you can see the new Architecture Explorer and UML diagrams. We had good discussions about why things are implemented in a certain way and good feedback that will go back to the VSTS product teams through our regular Rosario TAP calls.

I asked the organization for a code camp logo to show on blogs, etc. The below image is great, except that our code camp was in the MIC in Barneveld and luckily no real camping was involved...

In three weeks the first-ever public VSX Developer Conference will kick off. At the moment I am preparing my talk on TFS extensibility, primarily focused on partners who are creating marketable additions for TFS. If you want to attend, you still can: The fee is only $100...

There is a lot of stuff to tell and to demonstrate and so little time. The release of Service Pack 1 and the corresponding SDK have brought plenty interesting stuff:

VSExtensibilitySample: This new TFS sample provides an example of creating a Visual Studio add-in that interacts with the Version Control user interface of Team Explorer.  The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of such an add-in.

RichClientCustomControl: This new TFS sample provides an example of creating Work Item Tracking custom controls that work within Team Explorer.  The sample comes with a detailed Word doc that provides insight into the requirements of custom controls as well as a separate document that describes how to write custom controls that can be used within the Team Server Web Access environment.

How often do you search your development machine for code you developed before? Very often, right? And how often do you look for code on the web? Also very often, I assume. Search in Vista (or Windows Server 2008) are very powerful and so are the known search engines on the web.

So what if you wanted code that other people in your organisation created? That is where you can use Microsoft Search Server!

Search Server is based on Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 and has very simple yet powerful additions to search various content sources such as websites and file shares. To get started with searching the source code in your Team Foundation Server:

• Install Search Server
• Create a file share on a server
• Get the latest version of your TFS version control to the file share
• In Search Server Central Administration create a new content source and point it to the file share
• Add new file types, of files you want to search such as .cs, to the content index
• Start a full crawl on the content source

Now you are ready to go: Open the search page and enter something to search for such as "Page_Load". On the result page you will get links to the files in which your search string was found. Nice, right?

So next there can be loads of additions: You can create an integrated search within Visual Studio, apply effective TFS permissions, make search results open in Visual Studio, etc.