Sorry my blog has been a little quiet lately, as I've been spending most of my time unpacking boxes. While our place is still a bit of a disaster, most of the boxes are finally empty so hopefully I can get back to a bit more blogging.

The other thing I'd hoped to be doing (but didn't have enough time) was to get involved with the EntLib Contrib community. If you missed the earlier announcement, EntLib Contrib is an open source project that provides a single place for people to build and share extensions to Enterprise Library. Even though I haven't (so far) been very active myself, there has been a lot of activity in the community, led by serial p&p offender Olaf Conijn. Some great community extensions have been building up in the source tree for the last couple of months, and just this week Olaf and the gang have packaged it together into the first official release. Here's what you can get from this first release (shamelessly plagiarised from Olaf's announcement, with just a few spelling fixes :-) :

• PostSharp4EntLib - Combines the benefits of the Enterprise Library Policy Injection and of compile-time weaving by removing the limitations due to the use of remoting proxies.
• LogParser - Combines the benefits of the Enterprise Library Logging Application Block with the ability to deserialise from a human readable log text file all LogEntry objects back. This enables sophisticated log filter capabilities with LINQ on normal log files (.NET 2.0 and Orcas samples) with very few lines of code.
• MySql for DAAB - MySql provider for the Data Access Application Block.
• SqlLite for DAAB - SqlLite provider for the Data Access Application Block.
• Additional PIAB Matching Rules
• And Matching Rule: Combines 2 Matching Rules and evaluates to "true" only if both of contained Matching Rules evaluate to "true".
• Or Matching Rule: Combines 2 Matching Rules and evaluates to "true" if either one of contained Matching Rules evaluates to "true"
• Not Matching Rule: Contains another Matching Rules and evaluates to "true" if the contained Matching Rules evaluates to "false".
• Additional VAB Validators
• Externally Configurable Object Validator: An Object Validator that allows to use configuration from a configuration file other than web.config or app.config.
• Designtime Enhancements
• Lightweight type-picker for VAB: An alternative type-picker for the validation application block that allows you to enter a type name in a text-box (instead of using the tree-view to navigate the whole lot of types in the current appdomain).
• Extended SQL Data Access Block - This data access application block extends the SQL Data Access Block provided by Enterprise Library. It provides additional overloads for the UpdateDataSet method so that a collection of rows or a table can be passed to the DataAdapter for update. These methods were developed to support updating datasets that have multiple tables and cascading hierarchies.

If you're a user of Enterprise Library 3.1, this is definitely something you should check out. Since this is our first release, there may be a few rough spots or inconsistencies between the various projects. If you find any issues or believe we should set any specific quality bars for future releases (for example, around test coverage, documentation or samples), please use the Discussions and Issue Tracker tools on the EntLib Contrib site. Better yet, sign yourself up to contribute to the next release to make it even better!

Finally, I want to thank everyone who contributed their code, time and experience to get this initial release out. It's fantastic to see so many people passionate about building up this community and helping other .NET developers. Now, let's all get cracking on the next release!