Tom Hollander's blog

Great stuff! I do hope you can do a more thorough set of videos similar to the ones on www.asp.net in the Learning section. The WCF Software Factories also deserve a lot more attention.

The videos were very helpful Tom.

I'll brave a few constructive criticisms if you don't mind. The third video (and the one I was most interested in) seemed to have sound and picture quality issues - I ended up downloading the .wmv file and playing it locally but was having trouble pausing (WMP11 on Vista). The player would skip ahead a couple of frames even after the pause button was clicked. The screens in the demo were not always refreshing clearly either. Not sure if I was given a low bitrate version when I ‘right-clicked and saved as...’ but it was a bit rough at this end. Also I guess this is really minor - but your microphone position must have been different in the third video as there was significantly more rustling and microphone noise.

As for content I think you covered the topic well although perhaps a little more detail about the roles played by the various data and factory classes might have been nice - some of the inner workings. No doubt there’s a risk of attention-span overrun, but I would have been happy with a slower pace and more content. This is minor too - but I wished you'd included some common properties in the base class of your application block provider demo as well. Lastly, and although it's probably not your intention to be teaching people about dependency injection at the same time (and not a topic I'm claiming to be an expert on) – the importance of constructor overloads that make providers easy to test might also have been worth mentioning (specifically when you changed the constructor from receiving objectConfiguration to discrete arguments).

The videos made a big difference though and I couldn't have created my own custom application block without them. Not sure what the link etiquette is for your bog – but I wrote an overview of my experience with the Application Block Software Factory at http://www.58bits.com/blog - and included a Foo.Zip file with a sample project that I've created. My needs were similar to other EntLib libraries where I had a couple of dependant providers that would each be configured by a chosen provider in a chain (one provider naming its next provider in another list of provider types – just like logging categories and listeners).

A big thanks to you and the team for all the great stuff coming out of p&p.

Hi Tom,

Videos were good but (and I don't know if this applies to this discussion), can you direct me on where to get examples of patterns & practices on using the new version of the enterprise library 3.0 but without the GAX?

Thanks

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your reply.  But I may have phrased my question incorrectly.  We are building an application using ASP.NET 2.0 and want to use the Enterprise Library 3.0.  We want to find the various ways of designing the various layers (presentation, service, domain, data) etc. using the library via patterns & best practices.  Most of the information available on the internet is either too general, describes the inner workings of the blocks or refers to previous versions of .NET Framework and enterprise library.  Any help will be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

Hi any one help me  to configure Loggging Application with Oracle.. To Sql Server it is working fine...

I am learning to use the enterprise library 3.0 by following Tom Hollander's vedio example. Then i added the source code valiation and common projects as the references instead of the Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Common and Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Validation 3.1.0.0 dlls, to step through the code. The solution compiled successfully, however, when I run the client. I got a ConfigurationErrorsException in the ValidatedTypeReference method of the ConfigurationValidatorBuilder.cs class.

{"An error occurred creating the configuration section handler for validation: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.Validation, Version=3.1.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. The located assembly's manifest definition does not match the assembly reference. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80131040) (E:\\Projects\\TestProviderLibrary\\TestClient\\bin\\Debug\\TestClient.vshost.exe.config line 4)"}

Doesn't anybody know how to fix this issue? I want to debug and step through the enterprise library classes to understand how it works.

Thanks