It's almost exactly a year since I handed in the keys to the Enterprise Library bus, but I'm still as excited as ever about the release of a new version. The team has just released Enterprise Library 4.0, which features all of the blocks you know and love updated for Visual Studio 2008, plus the shiny new Unity Application Block for dependency injection. As always, you can grab the new release from http://msdn.microsoft.com/entlib and participate in the thriving community at http://codeplex.com/entlib.

Congrats to the entire team for another great release:

• Product Management: Grigori Melnik
• Program Management: Scott Densmore, William Loeffler, Chris Tavares, and Grigori Melnik
• Architecture: Chris Tavares, Scott Densmore  and Fernando Simonazzi
• Development: Chris Tavares, Fernando Simonazzi, and Nicolas Botto
• Test team: Hanz Zhang, Carlos Farre, Rohit Sharma, Naveen Guda, Pooja Parate, Pravin Pawar, Ronita Acharya, Sai Pasumarthi Venkata Appaji Sirangi and Vijaya Janakiraman
• Documentation: Alex Homer
• Edit team: Nelly Delgado, RoAnn Corbisier and Tina Burden McGrayne

Also thanks to everyone who worked on past releases who helped build such a strong foundation, and of course to everyone in the community who has supported this initiative and provided invaluable feedback.

Here's a summary of the official release notice from Grigori's blog:

What’s New in v4.0?

This release of Enterprise Library includes the following:

• Integration with the Unity Application Block
• Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) 2.0 support and improved instrumentation
• Performance improvements (particularly, in the Logging Application Block)
• Pluggable Cache Managers
• Visual Studio 2008 support
• Bug fixes

Note: existing public APIs (v3.1) are still supported.

The Application Block Software Factory and the Strong Naming Guidance Package are not included in this release but are available as a separate download. Thus, there is no longer a dependency on Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX).

For the detailed list of all changes, see About This Release of Enterprise Library.

Enterprise Library by Numbers:

Getting Started

If you are new to the Enterprise Library:

• read the Introduction to the Enterprise Library;
• download, compile and run the QuickStart samples—study the code;
• read through the related QuickStart Walkthroughs and “Key Scenarios” sections of the documentation;
• practice the Hands-On Labs;
• join the webcast in June 2008 (the exact date will be announced on the Enterprise Library landing page).

If you already know and love the Enterprise Library:

• check out the change log for this release;
• upgrade to V4.0—no code change is required—simply update the references to the corresponding application block assemblies and to the common assemblies;
• download the updated QuickStarts and run through the Unity-integrated examples to get the flavor of new dependency injection style of using the Enterprise Library;
• join the webcast in June 2008 (I’ll announce the exact date later).

Happy Coding!