EIF vs Enterprise Library

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Following on from my previous posting on Logging and Instrumentation and to address some confusion recently amongst customers, how does the new Enterprise Library relate to the Enterprise Instrumentation Framework?

The Enterprise Library is the latest offering from PAG, it brings together all the Application Blocks (Caching, Data, etc.) and ensures they work well together – it also sorts out any issues with them along the way (Performance, Scalability). There was a Logging and Instrumentation Block which leveraged EIF and was positioned to make using EIF easier, although I found the opposite as EIF was straight forward anyway J

The Logging and Instrumentation Block added a few new features but customers seemed to just go straight to EIF. Unlike the Application Blocks, EIF is a fully PSS supported product aligned with Visual Studio support (7 years if I remember correctly).

Last year the EIF team handed the Instrumentation “baton” over to PAG meaning that EIF won’t be developed any further as-is, EIF is fully supported for it’s supportability term but there won’t be a Whidbey version, if you’ve already made an investment into EIF your fine, your OK to where you are J

The Enterprise Library (EntLib) team has taken EIF and improved it for the V1 release of EntLib (Simplified Configuration files, etc.) and will improve it moving forward, the current release of EntLib is targeted at .NET Framework 1.1 and there will be a Whidbey (.NET Framework 2.0) version moving forward. EntLib has changed the look and feel of EIF so it’s not a straight forward port, but you didn’t have to write that much code for EIF so modifications should be straight forward (typically ;-)

Bottom line is new and future development – Use EntLib, if you’re using EIF today that’s fine carry on using it (you’re still supported) and you may want to move to EntLib moving forwards.

I haven’t had a chance to crack EntLib open to have a serious look yet, I understand that the Windows Event Trace (ETW) sink isn’t in the product “out of the box” but that will be shipped separately soon.

It’s confusing I know, but hopefully that’s cleared things up a little J