Enterprise Library for .NET 2.0 - November CTP now available!

Tom Hollander

7 Nov 2005 8:44 PM

Comments 15

We're pleased to announce that the November Community Technology Preview of Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 2.0 is now available to download (and on the same day as the Visual Studio 2005 launch too - what a coincidence! :-)

We've done a lot of work since the August CTP, and you will find this release is much more complete and high quality than the previous release. Still we're not done yet, and there are a couple of notable omissions in this release:

Unfortunately the configuration tool and designtime still are not complete, and we couldn't include it in this release. But don't dispair - we are making great progress and it's going to be there for the final build. In order to make it easier to use the CTP blocks without the tool, we've documented the XML configuration file schemas for all blocks in the release notes.
Due to some unexpected delays in our internal review and sign-off processes, we have not included the Cryptography Application Block in this release. We don't have an exact timeframe on when we will be able to release this, but it should be either in the final release or soon after. I'll be posting more about the situation with this block in the coming days.

Other than that, we're very close to complete. We're confident that this build is high enough quality for you to commence development with, although since the final release is scheduled in December we definitely recommend moving to it as soon as it is available.

And as always, we really want to hear what you think. The best place to post comments is on the Enterprise Library Pre-Release Discussions message board on our community site. Or alternatively you can post to the blog or mail me directly via this blog.

Enjoy!

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Enterprise Library

Comments

Chris Kinsman

7 Nov 2005 9:40 PM

Perhaps I am in the minority but I am not touching this stuff until you guys get your act together and release the config tools. This was one of the big problems with EIF and one of the saving graces of EntLib 1.0.
peter hardy

8 Nov 2005 5:36 AM

Chris, some harsh words there. These guys are working hard and producing some great deliverables. Of course we'll wait for it to stable up but in all honesty I think a few will be doing it with the whole of .net 2.0 and not just EntLib ;)

Cheers, Peter
akraus2

8 Nov 2005 10:24 AM

The Configuration classes of .NET do not allow me to specify a cross application config files for communal settings to read from. This is done to allow easy merging of machine.config and or 1..n web.config files as far as I know. In the EnterpriseLibraryFactory class I did not find any static class which allows me to specify an alternate configuration file to read from. Especially in the Enterprise environment I expect that as many applications as possible share the same logging settings at one central place. If I have to copy it for every application seperately and maintain n copies of my previously "common" logging settings would be a big minus. I hope it was an oversight by me and you have already some handy function prepared to fullfill this need.

Yours,

Alois Kraus
Tom Hollander

8 Nov 2005 12:41 PM

Chris - I fully agree that the config tool is a key ingredient to making this easy to use. We're getting really close now - and if it doesn't impact our schedules I'd like to release a beta of the config tool as a separate deliverable that works against the CTP.

Alois - there are a couple of ways to do this. One way is suppored directly by the .NET Framework: you can add an attribute called "configSource" to a section definition in the main app.config file which tells .NET to look for the section in a different (possibly shared) file. Of course this solution still requires that you have an app.config file with certain information in it.

The other option is to use the FileConfigurationSource instead of the default SystemConfigurationSource. When you access blocks through the static façades or factories you always get the default configuration source - but if you use the EnterpriseLibraryFactory you can specify an alterate configuration source. I know this is not well documented - we'll improve this for the final release and hopefully we'll get a blog post together on this before too long.

Tom
Chris Kinsman

8 Nov 2005 6:21 PM

Peter you are entirely right. That was way too harse. That was my frustration showing at not having a config tool for the last two CTPs.

My feeling is that the config tool isn't a high priority hence the lack of one.

I personally don't think they should release a CTP without it.

Just my .02.
Tom Hollander

8 Nov 2005 7:03 PM

Thanks Chris - apology accepted :-)

The config tool is an extremely high priority and I was very disappointed that we couldn't include it in the CTPs. The problem is that the tool is completely dependent on how the runtime works, and it has taken us some time to get this stabilized. However as I mentioned we are making great progress now, and if all goes well we should be able to sneak out an early preview very soon.

Tom
Christopher Zacharias

9 Nov 2005 11:13 AM

Just wanted to say that ObjectBuilder is an extremely impressive piece of software from what I've seen thus far. It's taken a bit of time to wrap my mind around what it does and how it does it with what little documentation there is, but it has been well worth the investigation. Awesome job. I hope it does eventually make its way into its own app block.

I was wondering if there will be any default configurators (i.e. XML) included with the ObjectBuilder or EntLib in the future. I'm presently writing my own XML configurator for DI based on the ObjectXmlConfig class in the CAB tests. However, I won't invest a significant amount of time beyond that example if there will be some configurators included eventually.

Thanks,

Chris Zacharias
Xerox
Brad Wilson

10 Nov 2005 6:35 PM

Christopher,

Thanks. :) We did not ship a default XML configuration system with ObjectBuilder, because where it is now, we view it as a toolkit with which to build dependency injection systems, rather than a dependency injection system in its own right. EntLib's use of ObjectBuilder and CAB's use of ObjectBuilder are quite different, for example.

As far as I know, there is no official p&p plan to provide a wrapper on top of ObjectBuilder that makes it behave like a more traditional DI system, although some of us who wrote OB have tossed around the idea of doing it as a community project.

Feel free to blaze trails. :)
Ivan

14 Nov 2005 8:09 AM

Hi,

First of all I would like to thank the EntLib team for this release. I have already started .NET 2.0 projects and EntLib does a great job.

Is there any other source of information that describes how the ObjectBuilder works? I managed to find out that it uses attributes to create a relationship between the configuration classes and other ones but other thing are not so obvious.

At least if someone could post a simple application, which uses basic ObjectBuilder features, it would be very useful.

Thank you
Ivan
Mark

16 Nov 2005 10:05 AM

Is it possible to use the EntLib config tool from previous versions in order to create the baseline format/structure of the required XML docs? Then go back in and modify them based on the documentation for the 2.0 release? Or have there been wholesale changes from 1.1 to 2.0?

Just wondering - maybe I should really dig in before asking this question .. :)
Brad Hehe

16 Nov 2005 3:25 PM

I know I had posted this previously, and I've yet to dig-in and validate tihs, but will we now have the notion of "cross-environment" configurations? I.e. the traditional DEV / TEST / PRODUCTION scenarios?

I'm especially interested in how this plays into the Data Access App Block so that I can determine whether I can make use of it in the design of some tools for my project. What I need is the ability to do something like "Fetch" from "DEV" and then "Write" to "TEST". So one given "object" has the ability to be directed to perform data access operations across to 2 different sources.
Tom Hollander

16 Nov 2005 11:05 PM

Ivan: At this stage the docs on ObjectBuilder are pretty thin. In the short term, expect blogs to be the best way of getting info. I would start with Brad Wilson (http://www.agileprogrammer.com/dotnetguy/) and Peter Provost (http://www.peterprovost.org/) as the best authorities for ObjectBuilder insights.

Mark: Due to the move to align with the new System.Configuration, the config file formats have changed completely, and the EntLib 1.x config tool will be of absolutely no help to you. I'm still hoping to get an early drop of the tool out to the community as soon as possible.

Brad: As you've discovered, we didn't have great support for multiple configuration environments in v1.x, although Olaf Conijn put together a great extension that addresses this problem (see http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/olaf/archive/2005/08/11/8890.aspx). For v2 we really hoped to solve this out of the box (and we even "borrowed" Olaf to help us) but at this stage it's looking improbable that we'll get this in the main release. However we've laid the foundations to make sure similar capabilities can be added in the future. We already support multiple configuration sources (eg separate files) so you can also do some of this yourself it you write a bit of code.
John

18 Nov 2005 6:25 PM

Hi,

Do you know of any body using Enterprise Library with MYSQL?

Thank you,
Sehat
Bill

2 Dec 2005 2:30 AM

Will the .NET Enterprise Library for NET 2.0 work with the Express edition of VB?
Geek Noise

6 Jul 2008 10:16 PM

Enterprise Library 2.0 November CTP Released!

Tom Hollander's blog

Enterprise Library for .NET 2.0 - November CTP now available!

Enterprise Library for .NET 2.0 - November CTP now available!