Enterprise Library - Silverlight Integration Pack

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For years the Enterprise Library (EL) application blocks have helped developers address the typical cross-cutting concerns of enterprise development (such as diagnostic logging, data validation, caching, and exception handing). With over 3 million downloads, it’s no wonder why the EL takes a prominent place in the toolbox of a modern .NET developer. These cross-cutting concerns are just as important to a Silverlight application as they are to any other type of application. However, implementing them in Silverlight can be quite a different matter. The Silverlight Integration Pack is focused on Silverlight LOB development and provides guidance and reusable components designed to encapsulate recommended practices which facilitate consistency, ease of use, integration, and extensibility.

What’s in the pack?

The tube map below depicts the paths through the Silverlight Integration Pack:

Resources

Both Enterprise Library 5.0 and Enterprise Library 5.0 Silverlight Integration Pack are available as Windows Installer Packages (MSI) via MSDN or as NuGet packages. The configuration tool is also available as a Visual Studio extension package (VSIX) from the Visual Studio Gallery.

Note: Direct link for the integration pack can be found here .

If you are new to NuGet, don’t look for Silverlight-specific Enterprise Library packages as NuGet packages are multi-platform. Just get the official EntLib packages (easily recognizable by the orange logo and the author - Microsoft). Depending on the framework your project is targeting, NuGet will install the corresponding bits. The only platform specific packages are source code packages.

While perusing the CodePlex site, be sure to check out the “Learn” section as there are hands-on labs (HOLs), videos, webcast demo's, the EntLib5 developer's guide and of course a discussion forum.

Summary

The Microsoft patterns & practices (p&p) team is responsible for delivering applied engineering guidance that helps software architects, developers, and their teams take full advantage of Microsoft’s platform technologies in their custom application development efforts. Releasing the Silverlight Integration Pack helps achieve this goal.