Enterprise Library 5.0 Beta1 and Unity 2.0 Beta1 are released
Greetings!
I am very happy to announce the BETA1 releases of Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 and Microsoft Unity 2.0. They are available for evaluation now.
Those who followed the progress of our team through the regular iteration-end code drops are aware what a massive undertaking this has been! With exception of the integration with the Visual Studio, this release is feature complete. Enterprise Library users who are looking at this release for the first time, please review the Change Log.
We are very excited about the improvements we’ve made to the overall Enterprise Library architecture and configuration experience, both of Enterprise Library and Unity (with new configuration tools, fluent interface and IntelliSense support with new schemas). We also focused on making Enterprise Library easier to extend. Our Enterprise Library Contrib community has been active releasing additional providers and new blocks. We expect many more contributions to be added there, thus enriching the developer’s toolbox of available components, and helping us realize the vision of Enterprise Library – to speed up software development!
If you are new to Enterprise Library, consider reading the new Developer Guide (an updated version with all chapters will be posted soon).
Please be aware that the team has put a lot of effort into thorough testing of this release. However, this is work in progress; more platform, performance, and accessibility testing as well as end-to-end scenario testing is underway. In particular, the Unity configuration tool is the latest feature that we have added to the Beta1 release. OK, it does have some quirks, but we will beat them out of it for the final release.
In the near future, you will see a migration guide that will help you to migrate from previous versions of Enterprise Library to version 5.0. The approach we are undertaking is to actually migrate several real-world applications and to capture the steps and lessons learnt into this guide.
In addition, shortly after the final release, you will see the updated set of our hugely popular hands-on labs and additional resource to help you get to grips with the latest and greatest release of Enterprise Library.
And lastly, I’d like to you to help us. Here’s your call to action. Download this Beta1 release. It will quite happily run side-by-side with earlier versions, so you can easily evaluate it without disrupting your development environment. Try the new features. Attempt a migration of an existing application. Tell us about your experiences. At the end of the day, the existing success of EntLib is due to your support and participation, and we look forward to this continuing!
- Grigori
pp Enterprise Library team