Just Released! Enterprise Library 3.0 - December 2006 CTP

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If you'd planned to spend the Christmas holidays drinking beer, watching cricket and eating way too much (or whatever it is that you normally do at this time of the year in your part of the world), I've got some bad news for you. We've just released the first Community Technology Preview release of Enterprise Library 3.0, so you may well want to spend a good chunk of the holidays geeking out with the new release. To coincide with this release, we've also launched a shiny new CodePlex site that replaces the somewhat rusty GotDotNet that we've used for our community for the past few years. The GDN site will stay there for now so you can view old forum posts, but it's been switched to read-only mode and the CodePlex site is now the place to be.

The CTP doesn't have a lot of documentation, but there is a reasonably detailed Release Notes document explaining what's new. Here's a quick summary of what you can expect:

Core

  • Source Code installer
  • Partial Trust Support
  • Strong-Named Binary Assemblies

Validation Application Block

  • Core validation API
  • Minimal Validator Library
  • Attaching validators to objects via attributes
  • Attaching validators to objects via configuration
  • Not included yet (but in the works): Configuration tool support, complete validator library, integration with ASP.NET, Windows Forms, WCF etc.

Data Access Application Block

  • SQL Server Compact Edition Support
  • New Database.UpdateDatabase overload with updateBatchSize parameter

Configuration Tool

  • Visual Studio IDE integration
  • AppSettings support
  • Encryption support

Application Block Software Factory

  • Templates and recipes for creating application blocks and provider libraries
  • Preliminary documentation

Strong Naming Guidance Package

  • Recipes to assist in strong-naming and updating [InternalsVisibleTo] across multiple projects

Keep in mind that this is a CTP which means there are going to be things that don't work properly and things that we haven't had time to complete yet - so while we'd love you to play with the CTP and give us feedback, we strongly recommend against using it in production applications. We expect to have more, (hopefully) even better CTPs coming out in the new year before the final release.

If there's anything you want to see us fix or change before then, please provide feedback on the CodePlex forum or use the Issue Tracker tool.

Enjoy - and have a Merry Christmas!