Grigori Melnik: Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond : Enterprise Library

Powered by EntLib

gmelnik — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:30:00 GMT

When speaking about or demoing EntLib, I often get asked which Microsoft products Enterprise Library is used in. There are several dozen internal Microsoft projects (that we know of) that take advantage of Enterprise Library. However, many people are particularly interested in commercial products that use it. Today I am able to speak about some of them.

This Monday the Microsoft Exchange team announced the public launch of Exchange Server 2010. There are many innovations in it, which you can read about on the Microsoft Exchange Teamblog. The reason I mention it here, however, is not only to congratulate the Exchange team, but also to proudly share the news that Enterprise Library and Unity container are used by Exchange Server 2010.

In addition, the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) Toolkit 2.0, which is now part of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2009 also uses Enterprise Library 4.1 and Unity 1.2

Through the course of my interactions with many customers, I’ve compiled an extensive list of companies that use Enterprise Library (including 50 Fortune 500 companies). Unfortunately, I do not have permission to share many of their names. However, you can find some of the case studies published here. In addition, you can explore Microsoft Solution Finder and search for projects with “Enterprise Library” as a keyword.

These endorsements are a clear indication of the value that Enterprise Library provides to Microsoft product groups, our customers and partners.

I would also like to use this opportunity to invite customers who would like to share their story, and be profiled on our patterns & practices development center page, to contact me.

Dependency Injection pattern in APIs

gmelnik — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:44:20 GMT

My colleague and friend Chris Tavares, who is the Dev Lead on Enterprise Library and Unity, published an insightful article in MSDN magazine on the usage of DI in APIs, which I highly recommend. It is based on our recent experience of doing architectural refactoring of the Enterprise Library. It outlines our design objectives and the approach taken to meet them. It concludes with lessons learnt and key considerations when designing your own API or framework.

Read Chris’s article here.

Zen and the Art of Managing Crosscutting Concerns – EntLib Dev Guide Preview

gmelnik — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:44:00 GMT

A new public preview release is now available on Codeplex. It now includes the following chapters, revised and updated for V5.0:

Chapter 1 – Intro. Meet the Librarian
Chapter 2 – Much ADO about Data Access
Chapter 3 – Error Management Made Exceptionally Easy

Your comments are invited.

Stay tuned for more.

Grigori at PDC

gmelnik — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:54:22 GMT

I’ll be at PDC2009 in LA next week. I’ll be happy to meet with EntLib and Unity users as well as critics, to discuss new features of EntLib 5.0, preview the new config experience and also solicit suggestions for post v5 work.

If you’d like to discuss acceptance testing and test automation strategies, I’d be interested in that too.

Look for me at the p&p booth Mon-Thu or ping me to set specific time to meet.

See you there.

p&p Summit 2009: What’s coming in Enterprise Library 5.0

gmelnik — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:51:06 GMT

Yesterday Bob Brumfield and I gave a talk on EntLib5.0 at p&p summit in Redmond . We’ve discussed the underlying architectural refactoring and previewed the following improvements:

Data accessors that will help you easily consume sproc results when using Data Access Application Block – instead of a data reader you get an IEnumerable back and can do all LINQ magic on it.
Logging Block performance improvements due to optimizations using predefined timestamp patterns mapped to high-speed formatting implementations and new “local” tokens for context info (e.g. localMachine, localAppDomain) that we cache.
Improved config experience epic which included:

programmatic config support via fluent interface
face lift of the config tool to make it more intuitive (especially when displaying relationships), simpler (by removing a lot of design time dlls) and better extensible (by simplifying the way config for custom handlers/blocks) can be plugged into the config tool)

Honouring validation attributes in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations
Getting EntLib objects in various ways :

via a single point of entry EnterpriseLibraryContainer.Current
or injected by the container

We also demoed container independency story which allows to switch the underlying container. Out of the box, you get EntLib shipped with Unity, but if you prefer to use another DI container, now you can easily switch over.

We are planning several webcasts to share these demos.

In the meantime, feel free to check out our recent bits here and provide feedback.

Removing WMI support from Enterprise Library

gmelnik — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 20:00:31 GMT

In our quest to simplify EntLib’s codebase, we are considering removing WMI2 support in v5. This is based on recommendation by our Advisory board, as well as lack of usage and interest from the user community and the high development complexity to maintain WMI2 integration (the code itself as well as non-trivial environmental setup on dev and test machines).

If this is something you care deeply about, please scream now. We are waiting for any scenarios that could convince us to keep WMI2 support of EntLib objects till the end of October.

Note: as part of our instrumentation story, we will continue to maintain EventLog and perf counter updates.

Enterprise Library reaches 2 million downloads!

gmelnik — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 02:49:46 GMT

Enterprise Library has a broad reach and adoption. No wonder, since it embodies many of the proven .NET development practices and ships with the code, tests and hands-on labs – lots to reuse and lots to learn from. The EntLib community has welcomed more than 2 million downloads worldwide! At least 10% of Fortune 500 companies use Enterprise Library (that’s who we know of). In addition, I’ve noticed that employers now list specifically EntLib skills in their developer job ads on monster and workopolis.

To celebrate the 2M milestone, our p&p colleagues surprised us with a cake. A slice goes to everyone who has ever worked on application blocks or the library itself (one day I’ll be able to do a better job and acknowledge each and everyone of you!) as well as to all community members who have used EntLib, commented on it, reported bugs, suggested improvements, written extensions. It’s been five years since this effort began and the tremendous success of EntLib today is largely due to all of you! Thank you! We look forward to continuing collaboration with you.

Don’t forget to check out our Codeplex development site where you can see what’s coming next (in v5) and download most recent code drops.

EntLib/Unity Trainers

gmelnik — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 01:50:00 GMT

If you are offering industrial or academic courses or workshops that use Enterprise Library or Unity, I hope you are already taking advantage of our updated Hands-On Labs. I would like to know what else we could do to better support you and the learners.

Please reply to this post or ping me directly. You may also want to send me your syllabus and we’ll consider profiling you under the Learning section of our Codeplex site.

- Grigori

Unity 2.0 container update

gmelnik — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 21:18:56 GMT

Our latest work on Unity 2.0 is available on Codeplex (see change set 28516). This is the first work we’ve done on Unity as part of the EntLib5.0 effort.

Major changes in this drop include:

ObjectBuilder2 DLL is now gone. The code is now completely contained in the Unity assembly, and you won't need to reference OB2 anymore in your projects using Unity. Over time the ObjectBuilder stuff is going to lose a lot of it's generality and be just the underpinnings for the container.
We're taking a first cut at fixing our exception messages. All the extra BuildFailedException’s that ended up in the inner exception tree are now GONE. Instead, you get a top level ResolutionFailedException, and the InnerException is the actual exception that caused resolution to fail. And the exception message has been reformatted significantly to hopefully get a better description of what the container was doing, and how it ended up where it did, when the error occurred. This is in response to user feedback to provide better error messaging in Unity. We consider this to be a significant improvement, but still need your feedback. In particular, we look forward to specific suggestions about how we could change the messages to be even more descriptive and intuitive. Please reply to this post or via Codeplex discussion thread.
Silverlight projects are now updated to Silverlight 3.

Enterprise Library 5.0: Architectural refactoring complete

gmelnik — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:19:45 GMT

The highest priority story in the EntLib5 backlog is ARC01: Architectural refactoring, which includes the use of a dependency injection container for wiring your EntLib objects instead of the one-off ObjectBuilder factories and DI container independence (to allow other containers such Spring.NET, Castle/Windsor, StructureMap, Ninject etc. to be used instead of Unity if you prefer so). This work is now complete. For details of this architectural update, please see an easy-to-read summary by Bob Brumfield. We also touch on this in the channel9 video.

As usual, the updated bits are available for preview on Codeplex - http://entlib.codeplex.com/SourceControl/ListDownloadableCommits.aspx

Video on what’s coming in EntLib 5.0

gmelnik — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 01:01:11 GMT

In this channel9 video, Chris and I give a 10,000 ft view on what’s coming in EntLib5.0. For details, consult our product backlog.

Thoughts on improving performance of the Logging Application Block

gmelnik — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:16:44 GMT

EntLib5 team is working on improving performance of the logging block (story LAB02 in our product backlog). We’ve identified that message formatting in particular takes substantial amount of time based on our own performance tests and customer reports. So, we are considering alternatives. One of them is improving performance of the formatting operations and another one is doing formatting and logging asynchronously, thus offloading the formatting work to a separate thread and improving perceived performance. Note, this discussion is not about optimizing the message formatting mechanism, which we may address separately.

Our intention is to implement these improvements on the opt-in basis to preserve the default behavior of the Logging Block consistent with the previous versions of the EntLib.

Here are the possible limitations we’ve identified when doing formatting and logging asynchronously:

1. When using the Logging Block, it is possible to utilize non-EntLib-specific .NET trace listeners (such as console, debug, eventlog, etc.). These trace listeners use TraceEventCache object to obtain context information, including thread-specific information, which we cannot control. This means that performing the logging operation in a thread different than the originating one may result in the log entry that has inaccurate context information.

2. Besides, the TraceEventCache also supplies the call stack, which we can force to be pre-computed in the originating thread. However, this turns out to be very expensive and likely be a waste since not all trace listeners would require it. Options include:

a. Pre-compute always

b. User elects to pre-compute via configuration

c. Add logic to the block to determine whether pre-compute is necessary based on the configuration of the trace listeners

Note, this is not the call stack you would care about when logging exceptions through the LoggingHandler of the Exception Handling Application Block. In this scenario, the actual message (together with the call stack) gets formed before a call to the Logging Block is even made.

3. With this approach, there is no guarantee that all log entries are effectively logged. For example, if a log entry posted just before the application terminates, it’s possible that the logging thread may not complete its processing.

We’d like to understand which logging characteristics you care about. Among the following, please select top 3 that matter to you:

A. Maintain the chronological order of log entries

B. Avoid depletion of the thread pool

C. Minimize the lag time between post of the log entry and its persistence (this would reduce the risk of losing posted entries)

D. Start throttling to avoid unbound memory consumption

E. Ability to provide custom logging strategies (such as async logging) to be plugged-in

F. Ability to elect which categories/trace listeners use async or sync logging mechanism

Based on relative importance of these choices, we will select a design direction ranging from using the thread pool to implementing more sophisticated thread and data management.

With your votes (feel free to reply to this post or send Grigori an email), please describe the context driving your choices and any other comments or concerns we may have overlooked.

We would appreciate your rapid feedback – if you care for this story, please do not wait with your response.

EntLibContrib – May 2009 Release and future plans

gmelnik — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:02:59 GMT

Two of our community champions François Tanguay and Stephen Phillips just pushed out a new release of EntLibContrib. This is the final round-up of all of the user contributions built around the Enterprise Library v3.1 core. They are now working on the upgrade to the EntLib v4.1 core.

The latest release of EntLibContrib contains the following functionality:

Common Block extensions
- TypeConfigurationElement<T>, AnonymousConfigurationElement
Data Access Application Block extensions
- MySql, SQLite and SqlEx providers
Exception Handling Application Block extensions
- SqlException Wrap Handler
Logging Application Block extensions
- LogParser, TimeStampParser
Policy Injection Application Block extensions
- PostSharp4EntLib
- New matching rules: And, Or and Not
- New call handlers: CursorCallHandler, OneWayCallHandler, SynchronizedCallHandler, ThreadSafeCallHandler, TransactionScopeCallHandler
Resource Application Block 3.1
- Configurable providers for Globalization and Localization
- Full application block complete with support for the console, instrumentation and group policies
Validation Application Block extensions
- New validators: CollectionCountValidator, CompositeRulesetValidator, TypeValidator<T>, ObjectValidator<T>, EnumDefinedValidator
- Designtime enhancements: Lightweight type picker, Test command
- Other extensions: Default validators, Argument Validation, ExternallyConfigurableObjectValidator

The Enterprise Library Contribution Project is to be revamped and upgraded to work from the Entlib v4.1 core - This will also include VS2008 solutions and projects and be built using .NET framework v3.5 SP1. To start the ball rolling the Resource Application Block has been upgraded to v4.1 and a new Query Application Block v4.1 has been added to provide the next level of integration for data storage. With the DAAB you got separation from the Database vendor with QAB you get separation from the data storage type with providers for the DAAB, Xml files and Web Services.

Other separate releases hosted on the EntLibContrib site are:

Standalone Validation Application Block 1.2: adds deep WPF automatic object validating data-binding via a new ValidationBinding markup extension.
Extended SQL Data Access Block 3.1.1: Now integrated into the main EntLibContrib release.

Other contributions in the source code but not in the latest release:

Query Application Block 4.1 New - Next level of integration up from the DAAB providing a common interface for data stored in a DB, XML file or Web/WCF service
Resource Application Block 4.1 New - Upgraded to include Unity integration and to work with EntLib4.1 core and VS2008
The Application Block Software Factory (needs GAX)
The Strong-Naming Guidance Package (needs GAX)

Kudos to Stephen and François! Great job, community! It’s good to see passion around improving and extending the EntLib. I would like to acknowledge the following contributions and contributors in particular:

MySQL Data provider = Wesley Hobbie
SQLite Data Provider = Kenneth Scott
Extended SQL Data Provider = Chris Dufour
SQL Exception Wrap Handler = Tom Hollander
LogParser = Alois Kraus, Randy E. and Mark Seemann
PostSharp4EntLib = Gael Fraiteur
Policy Injection Extensions = Olaf Conijn and François Tanguay
Resource Application Block = Steve Phillips
Validation Application Block extensions = Tom Hollander, Olaf Conijn, Martin Lapierre, Martin Bennedik and François Tanguay
Standalone VAB = Daniel Cazzulino
Common Extensions = Francois Tanguay

Look forward to the next EntLibContrib release!

Enterprise Library 5.0 … and we’re off!

gmelnik — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 20:56:37 GMT

We have officially started our development work on EntLib5.0. Earlier I’ve shared our product backlog, which was largely driven by you, the community. Our initial plan is to ship in early 2010.

If you want to stay tuned with what we’re doing, the best way is to keep an eye on the home page of our community site at http://codeplex.com/entlib. Here, you can view recent posts aggregated from individual team members’ blogs, participate in online discussions, get the most recent bits of code, see file bugs/issues, and access other useful resources.

As you probably know, we run our projects in agile fashion (XP@Scrum). For those wondering, yes, we do perform TDD, pairing (I kid you not! – even distributed pairing), automated acceptance testing, refactoring, daily standups, regular retrospectives, customer proxy demos, and iteration planning; plus frequent releases, continuous integration, collective code/content ownership, low-fi information radiators, and progress tracking. We are working in two-week iterations and will be doing regular source drops on Codeplex.

Now it’s time to introduce the mighty team. You will recognize some familiar faces (many of us have worked on one or more of the previous EntLib releases) and also see some new ones. I am privileged to work with this group of accomplished professionals. I give you… <drum roll please>:

from left to right: David Hill (architect), Alex Homer (documentation and user experience lead/writer), Chris Tavares (dev lead/architect), Bob Brumfield (dev/architect), Fernando Simonazzi (dev/architect), François Tanguay (system test/dev), Nelly Delgado (release lead), Grigori Melnik (product owner/program manager). Not shown are: Rohit Sharma (test lead), RoAnn Corbisier (technical writer/content coordinator), Dennis DeWitt (technical writer), Carlos Farre (perf test consultant), Mani Krishnaswami (test), Nicolas Botto (system test/dev), Olaf Conijn (dev), Mr X (security test).

For the kickoff iteration, we were able to get the core of the team together in Redmond. The level of energy was remarkable! This team has all necessary expertise, diversity of perspectives, and desire to deliver even more goodness and value with EntLib v5.0.

You should realize that, in reality, the team is way bigger. It includes 20 members of the advisory board who we meet with on a regular basis (every 2-3 weeks). These experts help steer our direction. I must say that they are quite direct and honest, and are not shy in pushing back on any of our ideas that don’t make sense to them or do not provide sufficient value for the buck. The advisory board is representative of our target audience with experts from large and small companies, from a wide variety of domains (such as retail, transportation, government, insurance, finance, military, health care, education, media, IT services, and more).

We are also leveraging much of the learning from the previous four major releases of EntLib. Therefore, we appreciate everyone who has ever been a part of the EntLib team. We are smarter today because of you!

In addition, seven members of the patterns & practices directorate (John deVadoss, Ade Miller, Ajoy Krishnamoorthy, Don Smith, Javed Sikander, Mohammad Al-Sabt, and Steve Elston) blessed our project. Their trust and support in our abilities to self-organize and self-manage are real tokens of confidence.

All other teams at patterns & practices are involved and provide their feedback informally on the daily basis. We also interact with many members of other Microsoft product groups via regular workshops, brownbags, and internal discussion forums (with 300+ members).

I would also like to acknowledge our sustained engineering team from Avanade, who have been doing a terrific job in providing online technical support.

And, of course, you – the community! Anyone who ever participated in our surveys, submitted requests/bug reports through Codeplex, shared their EntLib extensions via EntLibContrib, participated in the customer workshops, came to our booth at the conventions (TechEd, PDC, p&p summit, etc.), or in any other way provided feedback or suggestions has contributed to this development effort. For that, we salute and thank you! We build EntLib for you and with you!

We all look forward to yet another exciting ride developing EntLib v5.0!

Enterprise Library 5.0: Product Backlog prioritization results

gmelnik — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:50:00 GMT

Some two weeks ago, we exposed the preliminary product backlog for Enterprise Library 5.0 and invited the community to vote on the features that matter to them most. And what a response we got! Over 2,600 people viewed the backlog and 981 cast their votes, with 230 troopers persevering to the very end. 18 members of the EntLib Expert Advisory Board also voted. In this post I would like thank you all for taking the time to complete the survey, and I want to share the results with you.

In retrospective, every previous EntLib release had a theme:

1.0 = Integration of application blocks
2.0 = .NET 2.0 update
3.0 = Validation, PIAB, Block Factory
4.0 = Dependency Injection with Unity, WMI 2.0

Over the years, EntLib grew larger, and arguably more complex than it really needs to be. The community has spoken loud and clear that they want EntLib to be easier to learn and to use. We have taken this feedback seriously, and have decided to focus this release on enhanced user experience, simplicity, and learnability. The working slogan is “Simplicity for the Win!”.

So, getting back to the product backlog. Let me explain the methodology we used to analyze the data. Stories voted as Priority 1 got 20 points, Priority 2 got 19 points, Priority 3 got 18 points, and so on, with Priority 20 getting only 1 point. Votes from our team of expert advisors’ carried double weight. Then, for each story, we calculated an arithmetic sum (the total number of points), and - using these numbers - ranked all of the stories (obviously the story with the most points was ranked as #1).

Based on past experience, we didn’t want to plan our development execution in the strict natural order of story rank, because this would require juggling various blocks within each iteration, and potentially create silos of experts around each block. Instead, we wanted an iteration to have a theme that the entire team can focus on. Therefore, we decided to carry out affinity mapping of stories for each block, and calculate their group weightings (ignoring all stories with ranks 50 and higher, since those automatically made our P3 bucket and so are not likely to be done). We then stack ranked the P1 groups (colored green in the following table) and we plan to address them in the stack ranked order, with the individual stories inside the group still ranked according to the original scores. Note that learnability and user experience stories will be addressed in parallel with all the development stories throughout the entire project, and -therefore - those groups are listed near the top of the backlog.

Total points	Rank	Description (T-shirt size)
*Architecture*
2910	1	ARC01 : Architectural update: use DI container instead of one-off Object Builder factories; DI container independence (XL)
2164	2	ARC02 : Simplification of the codebase (identify redundancies, obsoletes etc.) (XL)
1898	6	ARC03 : Reduction of the number of assemblies (XL)
*Learnability*
2082	4	LEARN03: Notebook-style 150 page book for Enterprise Developers (XXL)
1400	12	LEARN02: Notebook-style 150 page book for Architects (XXL)
1338	14	LEARN08: Updated Quickstarts (XL)
976	22	LEARN09: Updated Hands-on Labs (XXL)
590	37	LEARN10: EntLib Overview Video (L)
524	42	LEARN07: Migration guide v.4.1 ->5.0 (L)
*User Experience*
1876	8	UX05: Config tool facelift - towards a more intuitive and easier to use UI (XL)
1718	10	UX03: Config IntelliSense for Unity and EntLib in XmlEditor (M)
1610	15	UX01: Better error reporting/messaging throughout (M)
1010	28	UX02: Debugging Visualizer for Unity (L)
744	36	UX04: Config IntelliSense for Unity in XmlEditor (M)
*Data Access*
2652	3	DAAB01: DAAB & LINQ basic integration (i.e. execute a query on a database, get back an object that you can do LINQ on) (M)
2012	9	DAAB02: Async ADO.NET support (M)
1390	16	DAAB04: No swallowing of SQL exceptions (S)
*Logging*
2006	7	LAB02: Async logging (text formatting done asynchronously) to cut down on load on primary thread (M)
1100	17	LAB03: Automatically purging old files by the rolling trace listener (S)
*Tool support*
1516	13	TOOL02: Support of Unity configuration (M)
*Unity*
1072	19	UIN01: Generalized interceptor (XXL)
1108	20	U06: Clearer error reporting (M)
1042	23	U05: Unity-MEF Integration (e.g. unityContainer.Resolve<MefPart>()) (M)
896	24	U03: Support for passing arguments to the Resolve method (M)
*Config*
1962	11	CFG01 : Config decentralization (support for config stored in multiple sources) (S)
1276	18	CFG05: Making Unity configuration less verbose (M)
1072	21	CFG07: Unity config auto-registration: expanded conventions and helper classes to reduce need for explicit configuration (M)
804	34	CFG02: Improved Config API (XL)
850	38	CFG03: Support for different sections of config in different media (not just files) (XL)
*Validation*
2438	5	VAB01: Integration with WPF (XL)
1020	25	VAB04: Decorating LINQ objects with Validation attributes (M)
944	26	VAB02: Integration with/assistance in implementing IDataErrorInfo (S)
840	33	VAB07: Validation Block refactoring to allow using Unity to resolve Validators (M)
570	40	VAB12: Inheritance-aware object validator (M or ?)
*Installability/Uninstallability*
858	29	INS01: Installer allows you to pick which specific blocks to install instead of the whole package (M)
864	31	INS03: EntLib installers to be included as part of installers of other custom products (merge modules) (M)
*Extensibility*
1028	30	EXT01: Simplifying writing extensions and plugging their custom configs into the config tool (XXL)
*PIAB*
784	32	PIAB01: Implement PIAB interface that takes an interceptor type (to leverage new Unity interceptors) (S)
718	35	PIAB03: New handlers (incl. RequiresTransaction and Call Forwarding) (S)
*Resource management*
996	27	RAB03: Resource Application Block (a provider to get assorted resources from various media/sources) (XXL)
*Localizability*
834	39	LOC01: Localizability of EntLib assemblies (L)
752	41	LOC02: Localizability of exception messages and templates (S)

Stories in P2 (yellow in the following table) and P3 (red) categories are listed according to their ranks, and not group ranks. Should time permit, we will address the P2 stories in the order shown.

P2
614	43	LEARN01: Discoverability and context/dependencies EntLib poster (L)
556	44	LEARN11: EntLib5.0 New Features Video (L)
682	45	EHAB02: Parameterized templates for exceptions (M)
572	46	TOOL01: Type picker improvements (sped up search, better generics UI) (M)
516	47	U04: Container introspection (S)
590	48	LEARN12: Unity Overview Video (L)
500	49	VAB06: Simple validating field only if the value is not null (S)
590	50	VAB13: Support for recursive data structures (M)
496	51	U02: Allow a mapping from a named registration to the "default" one (S)
506	54	VAB08: Enabling Validation Block to be used with 3rd party object relational mappers (M)
482	55	VAB09: Honouring validation attributes defined in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations (S)
468	59	LEARN04: Notebook-style 100 page book for Operations/IT management (XXL)
394	65	VAB03: ArgumentValidationException.ToString() show the validation results (S)
P3
500	52	UIN02: Caching of matching policies (M)
608	53	DAAB03: Fix: validation of sprocs parameters – do not validate (S)
496	56	LAB04: Authenticated Email Trace Listener (S)
430	57	CFG06: Support other config schemas for Unity config (e.g. XAML-based config)
402	58	U01: ResolveAll to return unnamed registration too (S)
390	60	LAB01: ETW sink (?, potentially XXL)
422	61	LEARN14: Unity Extensibility Guide (XL)
424	62	VAB16: Additional validator: Validator that checks that an enum contains a value that maps onto its defined values (S)
404	63	INS02: Installer ships both debug and release versions of the DLLs (S)
546	64	CFG04: Support for multiple pieces of config for a single block in multiple places (XXL)
412	66	EHAB01: Default post-handling action to ThrowNewException instead of NotifyRethrow (S)
378	67	TOOL04: Web-based config tool (L)
372	68	CACHE01: Adding a reason to the class that informs a user why their object was removed from the cache (S)
409	69	LEARN15: Guidance on environmental overrides in Unity (S)
409	70	LEARN15: Unity& MEF decision tree/matrix (M)
344	71	VAB14: Provide NullValidator to properly "ignore nulls" instead of the "Or composite" (S-M)
390	72	CACHE02: Cache backing store targeting ESENT (L)
352	73	VAB15: Additional validator: Number of decimal places validator (S)
292	74	PIAB02: Add non-generic overloads (S)
344	75	VAB05: Simplifying checking for positive / negative values (S)
282	76	LEARN05: Migration guide v.2.0 ->5.0 (XL)
266	77	VAB11: Better localization support (i.e. the first time the validator is used, the locale for the messages is defined) (M)
270	78	VAB18: RelativeDateTimeValidator update to compare against UtcNow instead of Now (S)
238	79	VAB10: Honouring MetadataType attribute (M)
238	80	TOOL03: Block invocation from the configuration designer (e.g. Configure a block, Right-click, Copy “Code to Invoke”, and then paste it elsewhere) (S)
234	81	TOOL05: Easier manipulation of validation trees (potentially, drag&drop) (M)
238	82	VAB17: Validator that compares against a single specific value (S)
196	83	LEARN06: Migration guide v.3.1 ->5.0 (XL)
162	84	LEARN13: Unity Extensibility Video (L)

The initial request for a Business Rules Application Block (which would help developers to take advantage of the WF business rule engine without creating a workflow) has been evaluated, and we solicited additional feedback from the advisors and the community. We didn’t see much convergence on the scenarios, and concluded that - at this point - we would not be playing in this area.

With regard to the platform we will target, originally our plan was to target binaries to version 4.0 of the .NET Framework. However, our advisors and the community pushed back on this. The result from 1,229 votes is shown in the following graph:

This data is significant enough for us to adjust our plans to meet the community needs, and so we will target the binaries to version 3.5 SP1 of the .NET Framework. We will also carry out our test path on version 4.0 of the .NET Framework to ensure compatibility.

A similar question was asked about the framework version to which we should target Unity. The graph below shows the result of the votes, and so the decision is similar to that for EntLib 5.0. We will be targeting version 3.5 SP1, but also testing on version 4.0.