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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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)
4. Honouring validation attributes in System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations
5. 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.