Microsoft Enterprise Library

The Microsoft Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development cross-cutting concerns (such as logging, validation, data access, exception handling, and many others). The design of application blocks encapsulates the Microsoft recommended and proven practices for .NET application development.

Enterprise Library is used when building applications that are typically to be deployed widely and to interoperate with other applications and systems. In addition, they generally have strict security, reliability, and performance requirements.

The goals of Enterprise Library are the following:

• Consistency. All Enterprise Library application blocks feature consistent design patterns and implementation approaches.
• Extensibility. All application blocks include defined extensibility points that allow developers to customize the behavior of the application blocks by adding their own code.
• Ease of use. Enterprise Library offers numerous usability improvements, including a graphical configuration tool, a simpler installation procedure, and clearer and more complete documentation and samples.
• Integration. Enterprise Library application blocks are designed to work well together or individually.

Microsoft Enterprise Library 6 contains the following application blocks:

• Data Access Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate standard database functionality in their applications, including both synchronous and asynchronous data access and returning data in a range of formats.
• Exception Handling Application Block. Developers and policy makers can use this application block to create a consistent strategy for processing exceptions that occur throughout the architectural layers of enterprise applications.
• Logging Application Block. Developers can use this application block to include logging functionality for a wide range of logging targets in their applications. This release adds asynchronous logging capabilities.
• Policy Injection Application Block. Powered by the Interception mechanism built into Unity, this application block can be used to implement interception policies to streamline the implementation of common features, such as logging, caching, exception handling, and validation, across a system.
• Semantic Logging Application Block. This application block provides a set of destinations (sinks) to persist application events published using a subclass of the EventSource class from the System.Diagnostics.Tracing namespace. Sinks include Microsoft Azure table storage, SQL Server databases, and flat files with several formats and rolling capabilities. Developers can extend the block by creating custom formatters and sinks. For those sinks that can store structured data, the block preserves the full structure of the event payload in order to facilitate analyzing or processing the logged data. Events can be persisted in-process or collected and persisted out-of-process in a separate service.
• Transient Fault Handling Application Block. This application block makes on-premises or cloud applications more resilient to transient failures by providing intelligent retry logic mechanisms.
• Unity Application Block. Developers can use this application block as a lightweight and extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection, as well as instance and type interception. This release adds support for Windows Store apps as well as the registration by convention feature to ease the task of configuring Unity.
• Validation Application Block. Developers can use this application block to create validation rules for business objects that can be used across different layers of their applications.