clip_image001A new version of Enterprise Library has been released by the Patterns & Practices team @ Microsoft. This library has been extended with an Integration Pack that focuses specifically on the development patterns and architectural guidance of the applications running on Windows Azure.

So what is in this package? The most important things are the following:

  • Two new application blocks:
    • Autoscaling Application Block ("Wasabi") to help you to automatically scale both web and worker roles in Windows Azure by dynamically provisioning/decommissioning roles or throttling. These scaling actions are based on timetables or on metrics collected from the application and/or Windows Azure Diagnostics.
    • Transient Fault Handling Application Block ("Topaz") to help you make your Windows Azure application more resilient to transient errors when you are using these cloud services: SQL Azure, Windows Azure Storage, Windows Azure Caching, and Windows Azure Service Bus.
  • One new configuration source: Blob configuration source to load configuration information from a blob in your Azure Storage account so that you can modify it without having to redeploy your application to Windows Azure.
  • Windows PowerShell cmdlets to browse and manipulate the Autoscaling Application Block settings directly from Windows PowerShell.
  • Protected configuration provider to allow you to encrypt sections of your configuration files in Windows Azure.
  • Updated database creation scripts so that you can migrate your code using the database trace listeners of the Logging Application Block and the Caching Application Block.
  • A substantial collection of experience guidance help you ramp up quickly.

The recommended way to obtain the Enterprise Library Integration Pack for Windows Azure is as NuGet packages. Alternatively, you can download self-extracting zip files with binaries, sources (including tests) and the reference implementation from MSDN. The configuration tool is available as a Visual Studio extension package (VSIX) from the Visual Studio Gallery.

Definitely worth to download!