EntLib 4.0 and Unity

Mon, 19 May 2008 20:46:02 GMT

Enterprise Library (EntLib for short) has become a standard for developing business applications in .Net. EntLib was initially released in Jan 2005 and combined a bunch of Application Blocks. Application Blocks were chunks of reusable code that helped developers accomlish common aspects of an application design such as database access, caching, security, and logging, without rewriting it for every application. By using the application blocks and EntLib, your apps have a well tested infrastructure for those common aspects.

EntLib evolved from v1 to v4 with an update approximatly one per year. Version 1.0 has been deprecated, Version 2.0 was rewriten to leverage .NET 2.0 framework. For example the Configuration Application Block went away and instead EntLib 2.0 uses the native .NET 2.0 Framework configuration functionality. Version 3.1 added the Validation Application Block and the Policy Injection Application Block and was released a year ago and was targeted for .NET 2.0 or .NET 3.0 (.NET 3.0 is required for the WCF functionality).

Here is a table of EntLib evolution:

Ent Lib Version	.NET Version	Visual Studio	New Features
EntLib 1.0 - Jan 2005	.NET 1.1	VS 2003	bundled application blocks (Data Access, Caching, Exception Handling, Logging, Security, Crypto, Config)
EntLib 2.0 - Jan 2006	.NET 2.0	VS 2005	Config app block goes away (leverages .NET 2.0 Framework config), mostly internal changes
EntLib 3.1 - May 2007	.NET 2.0 or 3.0	VS 2005	Validation Block, Policy Injection Block, improvements to Data Access, etc...
EntLib 4.0 - May 2008	.NET 3.5	VS 2008	Unity App Block, WMI 2.0 support, pluggable Cache Manager

What's new in EntLib 4?

What's different about this release? For starters v4 requires .NET 3.5 which means you will be using Visual Studio 2008. Also, v4 now integrates the Unity Application Block (Unity). Unity supports two key design patterns: Dependency Injection (DI) and Inversion of Control (IoC) . This can help application architects and designers implement loosly coupled dependencies which simplifies application code.

Mike Walker blogged about this release also. He has links to hands on labs, etc...

Of course the best source for more information about this release is the MSDN Patterns & Practices site for EntLib 4.0.

MonoRail's future

Sat, 15 Dec 2007 01:14:53 GMT

With the advent of Microsoft's ASP.NET MVC which has been released as a CTP called ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview, what will happen to MonoRail, the other MVC for ASP.NET? Well last month Hamilton Verissimo, aka hammett, the founder of the Castle Project, which includes MonoRail, ActiveRecord, MicroKernel, and Windsor Container projects, talks about his trip to Redmond in his blog post MS MVC and the MVC Team:

"And what happens to MonoRail? - you may ask. I’m not sure. I was really adamant that they should try to support all things that MonoRail support, but I’m not sure they are going for that. MonoRail 2.0 is pending their implementation. If the final MS MVC rocks, and provides so many things, I’d vote for forget the MR 2. If the final MS MVC has clearly something lacking, MR 2 could reuse the infrastructure and provide some nice extensions."

In his most recent blog post MVC Experiments, hammet includes the samples for download that he created on his visit to Microsoft.

Finally, the front page of the Castle Project site includes a letter to the .NET Community regarding the Microsoft MVC starts off:

"You are probably wondering how the recently announced Microsoft MVC project will compete with Castle's MonoRail. We think that any attempt to offer more productive tools, better testability and better separation of concerns is valuable, no matter who is the author."

And finishes with:

"Is MS' MVC better? Worse? Only once we have used both will we be able to tell."

So only time will tell if one or both will continue on. Microsoft has invested some great developers on the project so we should see some interesting options in the future. For the MonoRail team, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Talbott Crowell's Development Blog: Patterns and Practices

EntLib 4.0 and Unity

What's new in EntLib 4?

MonoRail's future