Microsoft Enterprise Library

Microsoft Enterprise Library provides an API to facilitate best practices in core areas of programming including data access, security, logging, exception handling and others. Enterprise Library is provided as source code, which can be freely used and customized by developers for their own purposes.

Benefits:

• Improved Productivity: Each of the Application Blocks provides several interfaces meant to satisfy common application concerns.
• Configuration Driven Design: Many technical decisions about the application behaviour can be delayed until configuration time of the application. For instance, if an application does not properly handle an exception, instead of adding another exception handler to the code, an administrator can configure an additional exception handling policy.
• Improved Testability: Many application areas can be reconfigured to improve testing of the application in isolation.

Application Blocks

The Application Blocks in Enterprise Library are designed to be as agnostic as possible to the application architecture, for example the Logging Application Block may be used equally in a web, smart client or service-oriented application. The patterns and practices team also produces more specialized Application Blocks that are not included in Enterprise Library, such as the User Interface Process Application Block, Aggregator Application Block, Updater Application Block and the Composite UI Application Block.

The patterns and practices team produces a number of other deliverables that leverage Enterprise Library Application Blocks. These include the Web Service Software Factory and Smart Client Software Factory.

Utilities

In addition to the Application Blocks, the standard Microsoft distribution of the Enterprise library includes:

• Configuration Console: to visually add an Application Block to an application's configuration.
• Security Database Console: to add roles, profiles and authorization rules to support the Security Application Block.