Grigori Melnik: Thoughts on Agile Software Engineering and Beyond : p&p

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.

Showcasing patterns & practices’ goodness

gmelnik — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:54:00 GMT

These are some of the events I’ll be presenting at in the next couple of months:

Patterns & Practices Conference Ukraine, Kiev, Sep 16, 2009 (www.pnp.in.ua)
Patterns & Practices Summit Russia, Moscow, Sep 22, 2009 (www.pnpsummit.ru)
Patterns & Practices Summit Redmond, Oct 12-16, 2009 (www.pnpsummit.com)
TechEd EMEA, Berlin, Nov 9-13, 2009 (www.msteched.com)

Whether you are using Enterprise Library or any other p&p asset, I’d be happy to chat with you about your experience. Look forward to it!

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 – tentative product backlog published, story/feature prioritization is open – your participation is invited!

gmelnik — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 09:01:00 GMT

EntLib Community!

First of all, let me thank all of those who actively took part in providing their ideas and suggestions for the next version of EntLib. There are over 50 comments posted to my original invite and a similar number of emails, all of which have been reviewed by the EntLib team. In addition, we have analyzed the results of the EntLib satisfaction survey, examined discussions and issues posted on the EntLib community site and conducted extensive consultations with the members of our Advisory Board.

The list included over 100 items, most of which are exposed now. If we missed anything important there is still room for you to add some suggestions of your own.

We have also done “T-shirt sizing” of the stories – a rough, relative estimation of the effort involved in delivering a given story.

At this point, we would like to invite you to select and prioritize candidate features/stories you care about. Please review them carefully along with the associated effort estimates and cast your votes. Do remember to stay within the budget (100 points). Here’s the link to the online survey.

NOTE: Due to the limitation of the surveying tool that doesn’t permit ranking matrices wider than 10, I had to flatten the survey that resulted in the 2nd page being rather long. It does NOT require you to answer all 20 questions though. You can vote for as few as top 5 and then move to the next page and vote for Integration Packs. Also note, that the backlog with the codes is posted on a separate page (see the link in the survey) and you can open it in a separate window, screen or print for referencing. Alternatively, simply review the backlog and take notes of the features you care about and then simply select them as your priorities.

We will analyze the results and produce the prioritized backlog defining what the team will focus on in the next several months. We will share the results of the prioritization exercise with the community.

Agile Perspectives PDC Workshop

gmelnik — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:14:00 GMT

As promised, here’s the deck Mary Poppendieck and I used during the workshop. We hope it was worth the attendees’ time. We encourage you to try new techniques we talked about and let us know how your agile adoption is going. For more information, visit Mary’s site.

Patterns & practices goodness – early Christmas

gmelnik — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 05:02:39 GMT

Earlier this week I’ve announced the releases of Enterprise Library 4.1, Unity 1.2 and Acceptance Test Engineering Guide BETA1. This is not all. Additionally, our group has just shipped:

SharePoint guidance is coming soon too. You can check their current drop on Codeplex.

These are very impressive and important deliveries. I am proud to be part of such a productive team!

Of course, shipping is not enough. A more important question is how many people are actually using our assets. In the next week or so, we’ll be revving our p&p exit survey which gives us additional insight into this aspect. I’ll post a link to it and invite everyone who has used our guidance or components to participate in the survey.

Agile PreCon at PDC 2008

gmelnik — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 05:38:57 GMT

Mary Poppendieck and I are set to run a pre-conference workshop on Agile Perspectives: Industry and Microsoft.

In it, we will provide our observations on what works, what doesn’t in the world of agile, and why (we call this segment of the workshop “Reality of agile”). The objective is to provide pragmatic advice, recommendations and actions that you could use tomorrow to improve the way your teams produce software.

Mary, the author of popular Lean Software Development and Implementing Lean books, will provide her lean perspective from many years in the industry (if you want to find out more about Mary, check out this really good interview that Scott Hanselman took with both Mary and Tom Poppendieck, in which they challenge the notion of success in software industry). In turn, I am going to share my experience from several projects at Microsoft patterns & practices. Several other colleagues from Microsoft will join our panel at the end of the day to debate hot issues of agility. The floor will be open to audience participation. Mary and I identified several hot issues to bring up. However, it would be really good to know what kind of stuff you’d prefer us to touch upon. Please post your At-Issue suggestions in response to this post or simply email me. Thanks and see you in LA!

Enterprise Library 4.0 for Visual Studio 2008 released!

gmelnik — Sat, 17 May 2008 00:16:00 GMT

Friends, I am extremely excited to announce the release of the Enterprise Library 4.0 for Visual Studio 2008. Congratulations to the team!

Quick Links:

– MSDN site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/entlib

– Community Forum: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=119312

– Community Extensions: http://codeplex.com/entlibcontrib

What is Enterprise Library?

Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges (such as logging, validation, caching, exception handling, and many others). Application blocks are a type of guidance encapsulating Microsoft recommended development practices; they are provided as source code plus documentation that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on complex, enterprise-level line-of-business development projects.

Goals for Enterprise Library

Enterprise Library is a collection of application blocks intended for use by developers who build complex, enterprise-level applications. Enterprise Library is used when building applications that are typically to be deployed widely and to interoperate with other applications and systems. In addition, they generally have strict security, reliability, and performance requirements. The goals of Enterprise Library are the following:

Consistency. All Enterprise Library application blocks feature consistent design patterns and implementation approaches.

Extensibility. All application blocks include defined extensibility points that allow developers to customize the behavior of the application blocks by adding their own code.

Ease of use. Enterprise Library offers numerous usability improvements, including a graphical configuration tool, a simpler installation procedure, and clearer and more complete documentation and samples.

Integration. Enterprise Library application blocks are designed to work well together or individually.

What’s New in v4.0?

This release of Enterprise Library includes the following:

– Integration with the Unity Application Block

– Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) 2.0 support and improved instrumentation

– Performance improvements (particularly, in the Logging Application Block)

– Pluggable Cache Managers

– Visual Studio 2008 support

– Bug fixes

Note: existing public APIs (v3.1) are still supported.

The Application Block Software Factory and the Strong Naming Guidance Package are not included in this release but are available as a separate download. Thus, there is no longer a dependency on Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX).

For the detailed list of all changes, see About This Release of Enterprise Library.

Enterprise Library by Numbers:

2003	Year when the first application block was released
2005	Year when v1 of Enterprise library was released.
1,290,000	Total number of downloads of Enterprise Library since the first release.
»470,000	Total number of visits to the community site (since Dec 2006 when the Codeplex site was launched)
»1,600	Number of discussion threads on the community site
54%	NPS (Net Promoter Score)
6	Number of Enterprise Library releases (v1.0, v1.1, v2.0, v3.0, v3.1, v4.0)
9	Number of Application blocks in Enterprise Library 4.0
19	Number of weekly iterations to build Enterprise Library 4.0
401	Number of interim builds of Enterprise Library 4.0
»900	Number of pages of documentation in V4.0
»8,000	Number of automated tests cases in V4.0
»100,000	Number of executable lines of code in V4.0

Getting Started

If you are new to the Enterprise Library:

− read the Introduction to the Enterprise Library;

− download, compile and run the QuickStart samples—study the code;

− read through the related QuickStart Walkthroughs and “Key Scenarios” sections of the documentation;

− practice the Hands-On Labs;

− join the webcast in June 2008 (the exact date will be announced on the Enterprise Library landing page).

If you already know and love the Enterprise Library:

− check out the change log for this release;

− upgrade to V4.0—no code change is required—simply update the references to the corresponding application block assemblies and to the common assemblies;

− download the updated QuickStarts and run through the Unity-integrated examples to get the flavor of new dependency injection style of using the Enterprise Library;

− join the webcast in June 2008 (I’ll announce the exact date later).

Happy Coding!

Information on Microsoft patterns & practices

– Visit us at http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/ to see the full line of existing patterns & practices.

Unity DI container 1.0 shipped!

gmelnik — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 02:09:00 GMT

Microsoft patterns & practices is excited to announce the release of Unity 1.0.

As many of you already know, Unity is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection (DI) container. It facilitates building loosely coupled applications and provides .NET developers with the following advantages:

Simplified object creation, especially for hierarchical object structures and dependencies;
Abstraction of requirements; this allows developers to specify dependencies at run time or in configuration and simplify management of crosscutting concerns;
Increased flexibility by deferring component configuration to the container;
Service location capability; this allows clients to store or cache the container.

You can download Unity (binaries, source code, unit tests, documentation, and quickstarts) from:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/unity

The Unity team thanks our Industry Advisory Board and all members of the community who provided meaningful feedback in the past 3 months. We encourage you to continue doing so and engage on http://codeplex.com/unity

GAX/GAT February 2008 Final Release

gmelnik — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 02:42:00 GMT

The Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) expands the capabilities of Visual Studio by allowing architects and developers to run guidance packages, such as those included in Software Factories, which automate key development tasks from within the Visual Studio environment.

The Guidance Automation Toolkit (GAT) is a guidance package which allows architects to author rich, integrated user experiences for reusable assets including Software Factories, frameworks, and patterns. The resulting Guidance Packages, composed of templates, wizards and recipes, help developers build solutions in a way consistent with the architecture guidance. In order to use the Guidance Automation Toolkit, you must first install the Guidance Automation Extensions.

New In This Release

The February 2008 Release of the Guidance Automation Extensions and Guidance Automation Toolkit has the following improvements to the earlier release, the July 2007 Community Technology Preview:

− Support for Visual Studio 2005 and/or Visual Studio 2008. This version of GAX will run on either version of Visual Studio. If you don’t have GAX installed, you can install GAX to support Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 or both. The installer will automatically determine which versions of Visual Studio you have installed.

− Updating GAX.

§ If you have a previous version of GAX installed on Visual Studio 2005, it will be updated to the February 2008 release of GAX. You are no longer required to uninstall GAX and the corresponding guidance packages.

§ Guidance packages that are registered with the previous version of GAX will automatically be registered with the current version of GAX (GAT, however, will require an update – see the information below).

− Visual Studio side-by-side support. If you have Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 running side-by-side, you can have GAX running against both versions. Guidance packages developed and registered through GAT for a specific version of Visual Studio (2005 or 2008) will only be available in that version. Guidance packages designed for Visual Studio 2005 and installed through an MSI will only be available in Visual Studio 2005. Installation of any guidance package through an MSI that does not explicitly prompt for the version of Visual Studio to install to, will install to Visual Studio 2005 by default.

− Improved Uninstaller. During GAX uninstallation, you can click the Check Installed Packages button for the list of all registered guidance packages. If you proceed with GAX removal, the uninstaller will only attempt to automatically uninstall those guidance packages that were registered manually using GAT. If you have guidance packages that were installed through an MSI(s), you should not proceed with removing GAX. Instead, you should use the Add or Remove Programs tool to uninstall these guidance packages.

In addition, this release of GAX has the following fixes:

− A blank error message was displayed if you attempted to uninstall GAX before uninstalling GAT or other registered packages when running Windows Vista.

− A FileLoadException error was displayed if you used the Guidance Package Manager on Visual Studio 2008 Professional.

− GAX and GAT would not properly validate and recognize custom Visual Studio project types when unfolding templates for custom project types registered only in the experimental hive.

Downloads

GAX and GAT must be downloaded and installed separately. GAT requires that GAX is installed first.

If you have a previous version of GAX installed on Visual Studio 2005, it will be updated to the February 2008 release of GAX. You are no longer required to uninstall GAX and the corresponding guidance packages (with an exception of GAT, which must be re-installed).

Enjoy!

Unity Extensibility Workshop

gmelnik — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:13:00 GMT

Microsoft Main Campus (Building 99)
February 18-19, 2008
Redmond, WA

Description

Unity is Microsoft’s lightweight, extensible dependency injection container.

Microsoft patterns & practices will host Unity Extensibility Workshop to walk the participants through the design of Unity container and its extensibility model. You will become familiar with all aspects of the container infrastructure and container extensions: from using existing extensions to building your own. A special attention will be given to the integration of Unity with Enterprise Library 4.0 and the refactored application blocks. Because the workshop will be hosted by the Enterprise Library team, you will also have the opportunity to ask questions and potentially influence the future of the Enterprise Library.

Purpose

− Transfer knowledge from Microsoft patterns & practices experts and authors of Unity/EntLib4.0 to attendees about building container extensions and integrating them with Unity;

− Transfer knowledge from the attendees to Microsoft experts about the common extensions that are useful in their application contexts;

− Advance hands-on exercises for others in the software engineering community to learn from.

Prerequisites

− This is an advanced, participatory workshop. It is highly recommended you have a working knowledge of programming in the DI style. There will be some introductory content around the technologies, but there will be a heavy focus on writing C# code.

− You must have prior experience using one of the existing DI containers, such as Spring.NET, Castle/Windsor, Structure Map etc.

− It is recommended you read “Deconstructing ObjectBuilder” posts by Chris Tavares.

− You must bring a laptop and a VPC will be provided. If you can have Microsoft Virtual PC installed ahead of time, it will save you from having to install it after you arrive. This will prevent you from having any other system requirements on the machine.

− If you plan on attending, please think of at least one extension idea you would like to introduce to Unity. One of the main reasons we’re hosting this workshop is to discover and share particularly valuable and important extensions (so we can make the underlying extensibility mechanism as easy as possible). We will ask you to define your scenarios at some point while you are here.

Cost

− There is no registration fee for the workshop.

− Attendees are responsible for making and paying for their own travel to and from Bldg 99 in Redmond, WA.

− Attendees are responsible for their lodging accommodations during the workshop. Suggestions can be provided after registering.

− Breakfast and lunch will be provided on all 2 days and a dinner event will be provided on Tuesday night (Feb 19).

Registering

We apologize for the short notice, but please send your info in by Feb 15. Attendance is limited to 25 people and registrations are based on the first come-first serve basis, so please RSVP by sending a note to Grigori Melnik as soon as possible. In the email, please provide the following information about each attendee:

− Full name

− Company name

− Software engineering background

− Types of DI containers used

− Email address (required for internet access)

− If a vegetarian lunch is required

Feel free to contact me for any other questions.

Who are we ? - introducing EntLib 4.0 and Unity Team

gmelnik — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 09:14:00 GMT

In my previous posting, I’ve acknowleged everybody who worked on EntLib 1.0-3.1. I should have mentioned the technical experts who participate in our advisories and help with their critiques and suggestions. Many thanks to them too!

And now … on to the new team – the one that is currently working on the next release of EntLib (v4.0) and Unity. I am posting the team picture because the world must know its heroes :) On the other hand, if we do a poor job, you’ll know who to throw tomatoes or eggs at. Anyway, I am pleased to introduce to you (left to right):

Venkata Sirangi (tester), Naveen Guda (test lead), Fernando Simonazzi (architect/developer), Hanz Zhang (test manager), Scott Densmore (program manager), Chris Tavares (dev lead), Nicolas Botto (dev), Bill Loeffler (program manager), Alex Homer (technical writer), Grigori Melnik (product manager).

Not shown are Nelly Delgado (technical editor), RoAnn Corbisier (technical editor) and Vijaya Janakiraman (tester).

This is a great team which I am proud to be part of!

EntLib downloads exceed one million!

gmelnik — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:42:00 GMT

Friends,

Typically I check the download stats for EntLib about once a month. Back in Dec I knew we were on the path to 1 mln downloads but today I am pleased to announce to the EntLib users’ community that now we have actually exceeded 1mln downloads! And that doesn't include the frameworks that a number of companies built based on EntLib and distribute through their own channels.

There has been a fair amount of discussion on the validity and value of the download metrics. Without going into any further debates (not that it's not worth it, it's just going to be another post), I think this is an achievement worth mentioning to the community and celebrating. EntLib is the only p&p asset that has reached this milestone so far. And it’s a significant one. It does correlate with the value that customers draw from EntLib.

Congratulations and many thanks to all who made EntLib such a success! I know I am risking to miss somebody (in that case, please let me know), but I do want to acknowledge the following people from Microsoft and beyond (in the alphabetical order) who have contributed in one way or another to EntLib throughout the years: Abhinav Bana, Ade Miller, Adrian Alonso, Alex Homer, Benoit Morneau, Bhavin Jayantilal Raichura, Brad Wilson, Brenton Webster, Brian Button, Brian LaMacchia, Carl Ellison, Carlos Farre, Chris Tavares, Dave McPherson, David Keogh, David Lee, David Raphael, Dhananjaya Rao, Dmitri Ossipov, Dragos Manolescu, Don Smith, Edward Jezierski, Eric Blanchet, Eric Deily, Fernando Simonazzi, Gokulaprakash Thilagar, Hanz Zhang, Hernan de Lahitte, Hisham Baz, James Newkirk, Jeevarani Radhakrishnan, John Socha-Leialoha, Jonathan Hawkins, Jonathan Keljo, Jonathan Wanagel, Kawarjit Bedi, Krzysztof Cwalina, Kyle Huntley, Lenny Fenster, Linh Nguyen, Mani Krishnaswami, Manickavasagam Shanmugasundaram, Mark Curphey, Meenakshi Krishnamoorthi, Mike Downen, Mohammad Al-Sabt, Nalini S, Nelly Delgado, Olaf Conijn, Oscar Calvo, Pablo Castro, Paul Currit, Paul Slater, Pavan Kumar Sura, Peter Provost, Prashant Bansode, Rick Zimmerman, RoAnn Corbisier, Roberta Leibovitz, Rohit Sharma, Rudy Araujo, Sateesh Venkata Surya Nadupalli, Scott Densmore, Shanku Niyogi, Shaun Hayes, Sharadda Arora, Sharon Smith, Shoichi Takasaki, Stefan Schackow, Terrence Cyril Joseph Anthuvan, Thomas Marquardt, Tim Osborn, Timothy Shakarian, Tina Burden McGrayne, Tom Hollander, Tushar More, Umashankar Murugesan, William French, William Loeffler, Wojtek Kozaczynski, Yen-Ming Chen. Thank you all!

Making Dependency Injection Simpler in EntLib 4

gmelnik — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 05:51:00 GMT

The benefits of modular design with cohesive components that have little or no coupling to the rest of the software system are commonly recognized today. Dependency injection is a mechanism that facilitates such aggressive decoupling and independence of components. Lightweight dependency injection containers (such as StructureMap, Spring.NET, or Castle Windsor) help assemble components (potentially from different projects) into a cohesive application at runtime and promote code reuse. An introduction to dependency injection can be found in this article by Martin Fowler.

The values of modular design implemented with support of dependency injection have been long recognized and embraced by Microsoft patterns & practices. Originally, implemented for the Composite UI Application Block (CAB) and later for the Enterprise Library v2 (back in early 2006), the ObjectBuilder pipeline allows to customize how objects are created at runtime. The current Enterprise Library configuration system is based on a DI container created using ObjectBuilder (Brian Button has written an excellent post on how Enterprise Library used ObjectBuilder).

With the upcoming version of EntLib (v4), we are planning to provide containers (flat and hierarchical) that will support dependency injection out of the box. These containers will be packaged individually and also with EntLib v4. Furthermore, to demonstrate the effective use of dependency injection on a real world project, we plan to refactor individual EntLib blocks and abstract away configuration code (configurators). We will build an EntLib façade that will have individual configurators injected in it as needed. A client app can go through this façade to request services while all wiring of objects necessary for those services to run will be handled by the DI container. This will not only make the design cleaner but will also make it easier to use and configure only those application blocks that you desire.

Once refactored, the EntLib blocks can be used as a la carte with other DI containers – some updating of the façade would be necessary and we invite the EntLib enthusiasts to port the EntLib façade to individual containers. Swapping DI containers means organizations can leverage their existing infrastructure.

For those who wish to continue to use the EntLib the way they always had, the current public API of EntLib will NOT be broken.

We believe that these changes will not only add well-desired functionality to the list of p&p assets, but further promote the principles of good architectural design.

Of course, we’d like to hear from you: comments, ideas, screams….