Getting Funky with the Enterprise Library

The various versions of the Enterprise Library have been around for about a year and a half now.  In that time, several folks in the community have built extensions, add-ons, and other various providers to make the Enterprise Library even more useful.  July saw a couple of these show up on the GotDotNet Workspace for EntLib.

• Have you ever wished there was a GUI that lets you edit the web.config file for your ASP.NET applications?  Well, a fellow named Olaf Conijn has started a new CodePlex project that lets you edit standard web.config sections in the Enterprise Library configuration tool.  If you haven’t checked out CodePlex before, it’s a new site for hosting community projects that uses the new Team Foundation Server on the backend.
• Want to manage your application’s Enterprise Library configuration remotely and ‘on the fly’?  Now you can with the new Manageability Extensions for Enterprise Library.  These extensions allow you to use Group Policy to update application configuration information, and to publish a running applications configuration to WMI, so that it can be consumed by any WMI-aware management application. The manageability extensions can be used with any application that makes use of Enterprise Library v 2.0, and does not require any recoding of the application itself.  Get the extensions here.  Read or post to the message board for help and more details.
• The Enterprise Library has had only four patches in its entire two year history.  That’s pretty good for a bunch of code that has been seen by tons of eyeballs.  However, in an effort to make it easier to find those patches, they’ve all been posted in one location on the EntLib’s GotDotNet workspace.  You can find them here.
• Lenny Fenster, who is a Microsoft Services consultant from the Philly area, just had his new book published.  It’s called Effective Use of Microsoft Enterprise Library.  Not only has Lenny used the EntLib in the “real world” on actual projects, he was one of the developers on the project itself!  I haven’t had a chance to get a copy for myself to read, but I will be soon.