When I first joined patterns & practices more almost six years ago, I moved right into the “delta lounge” which was the triangular-shaped team room where we created EntLib 1.0.

Who’s have thought that we’d now be up to EntLib 5.0, but here we are.

For all the details of the new features and capabilities in this version, please read the official announcement on Grigori Melnik’s blog.

Congrats to the EntLib Team for another great release!

Way back in 2004, sitting in the “delta lounge” team room with Scott, Brian, Ed, T-Shak, Rohit, Prashant and Mani, I never would have believed that almost 5 years later, we’d still be shipping Enterprise Library (aka EntLib) or that we’d be up to version 5.0.

A few days ago, my good friend Grigori Melnik, who is the PM for EntLib over in Patterns & Practices, sent me an email reminding me that they are looking for planning input on the version 5.0 features.

He’s written it all up over on his blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/agile/archive/2009/01/26/enterprise-library-5-what-s-on-your-wish-list.aspx

If you are a current or past EntLib user, please don’t miss this opportunity to help steer the product. As I tell my wife, “If you don’t tell me what you want, you shouldn’t expect me to get you the right thing.”

Here is some good news... Enterprise Library has been updated and has moved from its old home on GotDotNet to CodePlex!

Here is their new site: http://www.codeplex.com/entlib

For all the details, see Tom Hollander's blog post. Lots of good stuff in there.

PS. If you want to help us out a bit... click that codeplex link... just once... come on... you can do it... we want to be #1 on codeplex. :)

The patterns & practices team has released the Manageability Extensions for Enterprise Library January 2006. Please download this extension from the Downloads page on the Enterprise Library Community Site.

Manageability extensions for Enterprise Library Jan 2006 allows you to use Group Policy to update application configuration information, and to publish a running applications configuration to WMI, so that it can be consumed by any WMI-aware management application. The manageability extensions can be used with any application that makes use of Enterprise Library v 2.0, and does not require any recoding of the application itself.

Please feel free to discuss this CTP in the Manageability Extensions Message Board. All feedback is appreciated.

Want to see the Enterprise Library application blocks in action in a realistic service oriented application? And would you like automated guidance to help you build your own applications that comply with a proven architecture? Then check out the July Communtiy Drop of the Web Service Software Factory. In addition to providing a reference implementation, written and automated guidance around building service interfaces with ASMX, this latest drop includes a new data access guidance package that makes it easy to build a data access layer using the Enterprise Library Data Access Application Block.

Please visit the project site at GotDotNet.com to download it.

While finally catching up on blogs I read, I ran across Brian Buttons recent post titled Enterprise Library and Object Builder. Whether you are using CAB, EntLib or Object Builder directly you should go read his post, as it is full of all kinds of nuggets. For example:

The way OB can tell whether or not to treat an instance of a singleton or not is through ObjectBuilder concepts called Locators and LifetimeContainers. LifetimeContainers, in OB-speak, manage the lifetime of named instances of objects. You can register an object and its name with a LifetimeContainer, and it will keep that object alive until such time as you dispose of the LifetimeContainer. And every LifetimeContainer is associated with a Locator. A Locator acts as a dictionary that maps instance names to objects, but it does it using WeakReferences — this means that storing something in a Locator will not prevent that object from being GCed. Tot keep an object alive, you need to provide the LifetimeContainer as well, which is what keeps the references in use, preventing the object from being scavenging out of existence.

Good stuff.

Yesterday evening the patterns & practices Enterprise Library Team hit another milestone on the way to the 2.0 release by publishing the Enterprise Library 2.0 November CTP. There are only a few things left to do before they ship the final bits, so go grab these and give it a try.

For more information about this release and what is and is not in this package, see Tom Hollander’s blog post on the subject.