Grigori Melnik: Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond : labs

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

Just Released – Hands-on Labs for Enterprise Library 4.1 and Unity 1.2

gmelnik — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:38:00 GMT

I know it’s easy to get lost in the plethora of announcements and buzz from MIX’09, but today we are releasing a set of hands-on labs for all the application blocks in Enterprise Library. We believe that this valuable release will not go unnoticed by the community of devoted EntLib users and want to take this opportunity to highlight it for new users as well. After all, the labs are meant to help you get up to speed with EntLib.

This release includes a refresh of the labs for the following blocks:

- Caching Application Block

- Cryptography Application Block

- Data Access Application Block

- Exception Handling Application Block

- Logging Application Block

- Security Application Block

There are also two entirely new hands-on labs covering Interception and Dependency Injection with Unity. The Validation Block hands-on lab was released back in December and the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve received on it encouraged the team to produce the rest.

You can download the entire set in both C# and Visual Basic .NET: Hands-on Labs for Enterprise Library 4.1
If you prefer to download the Unity lab as a standalone, it’s also available: Hands-on Labs for the Unity Application Block 1.2

You can do them in any order. They will guide you through common scenarios of using EntLib in various application contexts. Some labs go into advanced topics and you may want do them a couple of times. Also, don’t be shy about improvising and departing from the scenarios written in the lab instructions.

The labs may also be of value to trainers and academics, since they can be used as teaching aids in the classes devoted to Enterprise Library specifically or in courses on Component-Based Software Engineering, Enterprise Application Development, and Aspect-Oriented Programming.

With this release, the EntLib team reiterates its commitment to enhancing learnability and increasing ease of use of Enterprise Library. Please, try them. Whether you love them or feel frustrated (especially if you feel frustrated), please send us your feedback.

Just Released: Validation Application Block Hands-On Lab

gmelnik — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 18:35:03 GMT

Here’s a gift for the New Year’s. We have produced a new hands-on lab on validation with Enterprise Library. It contains 13 exercises that walk you through capabilities of the Validation Application Block in various application contexts:

The first 11 deal with a Windows Forms data processing application that takes the information entered by the user to populate and process business entities. The Validation Application Block is used to validate the created business objects before processing them in gradually more sophisticated ways.
Starting with Lab 7, the Windows Forms validation–integration feature is used to directly validate the input for the form's controls.
Labs 8 through 11 deal with the extensibility of the application block.
Lab 12 shows how to use the ASP.NET validation-integration feature of the application block to validate the ASP.NET control's values, using a Web forms version of the simple data entry application from the previous labs.
Finally, for Lab 13, the ASP.NET application works as a front-end for a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service while the WCF validation–integration feature of the application block is used to declaratively validate the service parameters on the server side.

The lab instructions are available as a CHM for easy navigation and as a PDF for printing.

There are two ways you can complete this lab set: you can manually complete it from start-to-finish or you can use the starter solutions to complete only the labs you want to. By using the provided starter solutions, you can complete any of the labs in the order you prefer.

Download Validation HOL

Next up is our new Interception hands-on lab. You may expect to see it released in January.

What is Enterprise Library team currently up to?

gmelnik — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 01:10:00 GMT

After shipping Enterprise Library v4.1, the team is focusing on the ease-of-use and learnability aspects of both EntLib and Unity. Our top stories of the current backlog include the following:

Unity for Silverlight [Done - 12/14/2008]
Comprehensive Enterprise Library FAQs [Done - 2/10/2009]
Validation Block Hands-on Lab [Done - 1/3/2009]
Interception Hands-on Lab [Done - 3/18/2009]
Unity Extensibility documentation [In Dev]
New video on Unity (level 200)
New video on Unity Extensibility (level 400)
Customer satisfaction survey analysis [Done]

These are all things we plan on doing prior to starting Enterprise Library v5 research and planning work early next year.