Blaine Wastell - patterns & practices client architecture guidance : EntLib

Announcing 6 new patterns and practices releases

blaine — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 21:28:52 GMT

The patterns & practices team just published 6 new releases in the last two weeks. Ajoy discusses the releases on his blog. The new releases include:

Enterprise Library v4.1
Unity Application Block v1.2
Distributed Agile Development white paper and Agile showcase
Application Architecture Guide v2.0 (Beta 1)
SharePoint Development Guidance v1.0
Acceptance Testing Guidance

Check out the new guidance as there is truly lots of new and useful guidance.

Do we listen to the community?

blaine — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:51:33 GMT

Does the patterns & practices client team listen to the community? It is easy for someone in our position to fall into the "ivory tower" trap and not listen to customers. Within patterns & practices we work hard at listening to the community when working on releases. I am interested in hearing both the good and bad of the client team listening / not listening to the community. So please share as we work on improving our assets and helping you create line of business applications that deliver business results for your customers.

Mike Puleio worked with the development team to close issues identified by the smart client community. He recently blogged about the number of items recently closed:

Out of 89 open work items/ issues, we closed 45 yesterday. A number of these had been fixed in the May 2007 release and never closed, a number were fixed in this release, and some were related to different weekly drops.
Out of the top 25 items (by community votes), we closed 13.
Looked at another way, we closed 1/2 of the open issues, and 1/2 of the top issues.

I want you perspective on if this is good or is it bad. I view this as good, but I do not want to be in the "ivory tower" so I want to hear from you? When thinking about the question of is the client team listening to the community, I ask:

What are we doing well?
What do we need to improve?
What should we do more of?
What should we stop doing?

With this feedback, if you can prioritize it I would appreciate it. Just like on your projects, we have limited resources that we need to figure out where to spend our money to have the most customer impacts. By the way the feedback right now is timely given we are working on creating our fiscal 09 plan.

So let us know your thoughts.

SCSF April 2008 Alpha for Visual Studio 2008 Published to CodePlex

blaine — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:08:00 GMT

In response to customer requests, we just published the Smart Client Software Factory April 2008 Alpha release to CodePlex. As I mentioned in a previous blog we are close to finishing this release. The current plan is to go out with EntLib 3.1 support as we are not taking advantage of new EntLib 4.0 features such as Unity. If you have a compelling reason for us to delay the release for EntLib 4.0 we want to hear from you soon so we have time to consider the change.

New in this release:

The April 2008 release of the Smart Client Software Factory includes support for Visual Studio 2008. This release does not support Visual Studio 2005.
We fixed a few bugs that were identified by the community.
Requires Guidance Automation Extensions 1.4.
April 2008 Guidance Package can run side-by-side with the May 2007 Guidance Package.

Known issues

If the SCSF source is installed on the default path, compiling Quickstarts.WPFIntegration.sln will fail with path too long error.
If the SCSF source is installed on the default path, compiling GuidancePackage.sln will fail with path too long error.
Unit tests of CompositeUI.WPF.Tests project (in CompositeUI-WPFExtensions.sln) will fail when executed under debug mode.

Note: This is an alpha release and still has known bugs. We have not completed testing the factory. Use at your own risk.

Go try it out and give us your feedback on the discussion board especially regarding EntLib 3.1 and 4.0 support. You should also read Mike's blog on the release.

Using EntLib 3.1 with Visual Studio 2008

blaine — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:13:54 GMT

If you want to use "take full advantage of Enterprise Library 3.1", Scott Densmore just posted a blog about how to make it work on Visual Studio 2008.

We have had customers using WCSF February 2008 which runs on Visual Studio 2008 ask how they can use the factory with Enterprise Library 3.1 which runs on Visual Studio 2005. For those that need this capability now you should you should refer to Scott's blog.