Windows Developer Power Tools

18.1 Reusing Professional Infrastructure with Enterprise Library

Nearly all programs in the .NET world have common infrastructure elements—they all do logging, access data, handle exceptions, deal with security, and so on. Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t have to write the code to implement all of this functionality for yourself? And wouldn’t it be really great if .NET experts, perhaps from Microsoft itself, wrote the code for you?

Enter the Enterprise Library, a set of reusable enterprise-quality library components provided by Microsoft’s patterns & practices group that solves these very problems for you. It was written by experts in .NET and reviewed by internal Microsoft product teams, and it’s in use in thousands of development shops all over the world.

Over the past several years, the patterns & practices team has been creating smaller, reusable pieces of executable guidance called application blocks. These individual blocks, published as source code, were intended as examples of how particular problems such as data access, caching, and logging can best be performed on the .NET platform. These blocks served their purposes well, but they were difficult to use together. In creating the Enterprise Library, the main goal was to preserve the functionality of each individual block while providing a simple way for them all to work together. In its final form, the Enterprise Library consists of Caching, Data Access, Exception Handling, Logging, Security, and Cryptography application ...