Enterprise Library 5.0 is near: Beta 2 is out!

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It’s been just a month since we released Beta 1. In this short period of time, it has received substantial attention from the community (with ~3,600 downloads). Thanks to all of you who provided comments and reported issues on CodePlex.

The last two iterations leading to Beta 2 were primarily focused on bug fixes and configuration tool improvements. We have reduced our bug backlog (which included not only bugs from v5.0 but also bugs deferred from previous releases of Enterprise Library) significantly and are shipping Beta 2 with no known Severity 1 (Blocking) or Severity 2 (Critical) bugs. Kudos to the team for staying focused on driving out the bugs!

In this release, we have also completed two out of three stories around Visual Studio 2010/.NET Framework 4.0 integration:

  • ­ We have done initial testing that shows that Enterprise Library 5.0 binaries targeting .NET Framework 3.5 work unchanged when referenced from .NET Framework 4.0 projects. Further testing will continue.
  • ­ The Enterprise Library 5.0 source tree now includes Visual Studio 2010 solution and project files (look for the ones with "2010" suffixes) that will compile targeting .NET Framework 4.0.

In addition, the configuration tool is now fully integrated with Visual Studio 2008. It features an improved type picker as well configuration validation, which now allows for more effective debugging (double clicking on the error will focus the cursor in the configuration tool surface on the invalid element).

We also had to make a hard decision to remove Unity design time support. Being the last feature added, it’s been seriously under tested and the risks of it churning too much appears to be high. Keeping it would risk our ability to release Enterprise Library 5.0 RTW as planned. Therefore, we are now planning to ship the Unity configuration tool out-of-band after the release of Enterprise Library 5.0.

For the full Change Log, please refer to this page.

On the road to shipping a high quality final release, we ask you to download this Beta 2 and provide your feedback. Unity 2.0 Beta 2 is available here. You will have to uninstall Beta 1, but other earlier versions of Enterprise Library can run happily side-by-side -- so you can do your beta testing without disrupting your main development environment. Please try the new features. Attempt a migration of an existing application. Play with new configuration tool. Tell us about your experiences.

On to the final stretch to RTW now…

Grigori