After the release of Enterprise Library 5.0 and Unity 2.0 in April 2010, our team focused on getting the hands-on labs out and the new Developer’s Guide to Enterprise Library, including versions localized to Russian (already out) and now working on Japanese, Chinese and Spanish editions as well as a Visual Basic edition. We also had many events to present at and interact with developers around the world, including TechEd North America, p&p symposia in Russia, Ukraine, and our flagship event in Redmond. Watch for the upcoming presentations at TechEd China and the p&p symposium Japan later this year.

I would like to provide a quick update on what’s coming from the Enterprise Library team in the next 8 months or so. Let’s take a look.

Instead of a large release (like v5 was), you’ll notice several smaller releases planned. They include:

1) SqlConfigurationSource (tentative release date – Nov 2010)

• Use it if you want to store your configuration in a database
• We’re strengthening it by supporting encryption and change notifications
• Expect a source code release on Codeplex

2) Enterprise Library Extensibility Hands-on Labs (tentative release date – Nov 2010)

• These comprehensive tutorials will take you all the way from building custom providers (using examples of custom logging trace listener and custom exception handler) to custom configuration sources and on to designing an entirely new application block;
• The exercises include instructions on how to easily plug your custom pieces into the config tool

3) Enterprise Library Silverlight Integration Pack (tentative release date – Apr 2011)

• Through a public consultation, many internal conversations and discussions with the attendees of the p&p symposia and other conferences, we’re exploring scenarios relevant to enterprises building LOB apps in Silverlight. Based on these, it appears that Exception Handling, Logging and Validation blocks are on top of the list. Interception support for Unity is also frequently requested. We will continue our exploration and story analysis. Stay tuned. If you have specific scenarios/pain points where you see that EntLib could fill in the gap, please share those with us.

4) Enterprise Library Web Integration Pack (tentative release date – June 2011)

• The idea is to make it easier to integrate with ASP.NET MVC3
• This is still at the early thinking stage. Candidate stories include UnityControllerFactory (to let you use DI in your controllers), VAB integration with model binders and a nice sample/quickstart.

In the past 6 months, there were over 300K downloads of Enterprise Library 5.0 and the related guidance (doc, labs, videos). We are energized by the level of adoption and look forward to future releases. As always, we need your feedback.