Congratulations to the Enterprise Library Team for their release of Enterprise Library 4.0. A few enhancements and bug fixes in this release, but most importantly it comes with Unity IoC Integration.
As you may or may not know, Unity is Microsoft Patterns & Practices lightweight, extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection. You may be familiar with other Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control ( IoC ) Tools, like Castle Windsor, SpringFramework.NET, StructureMap, and other tools providing similar functionality. I have several tutorials and screencasts on Unity, such as:
As far as a list of changes to Enterprise Library 4.0, here are my cliff notes:
- Integration with the Unity Application Block - Use the Unity Application Block (Unity) to generate instances of Enterprise Library objects, and inject Enterprise Library object instances into other objects.
- WMI 2.0 Support - Enterprise Library 4.0 takes advantage of the improved features in the .NET WMI 2.0 API.
- Partial Trust Support - Enterprise Library has the Allow Partially-Trusted Caller attribute (APTCA) on all assemblies
- Caching Application Block - The application block has been refactored to allow developers to replace the CacheManager class with their own implementation if required.
- Cryptography Application Block - Supports new performance counters, such as Total Hash Comparisons, Total Hash Mismatches, Total Hash Operations, Total Symmetric Decryptions, and Total Symmetric Encryptions.
- Data Access Application Block - Supports new performance counters, such as Total Commands Executed, Total Commands Failed, Total Connections Opened, and Total Connections Failed.
- Exception Handling Application Block - Logging Handler has a new Boolean property named UseDefaultLogger, and new performance counters, such as Total Exceptions Handlers Executed and Total Exceptions Handled.
- Logging Application Block - Better filtering, much improved Rolling Log File TraceListener, better performance through delayed gathering of context information, support for environment variables in log file names, and the new performance counters are Total Logging Events Raised, Total Trace Listener Entries Written, and Total Trace Operations Started.
- Policy Injection Application Block - Ruleset support on ObjectValidator, and call handlers now have an Order Property to set order in which call handlers are called.
- Security Application Block - New performance counters, such as new counters are Total Authorization Requests, Total Authorization Requests Denied, and Total Security Cache Reads.
- Validation Application Block - Use of multiple rule sets to validate an object.
If you are new to Enterprise Library, you can find several tutorials on Enterprise Library on my website to get you started. Here are perhaps the ones I would start with:
Check out PnPGuidance as well.
Download Enterprise Library 4.0 here.