What is going to happen with UIP?

Recently I asked you all for your suggestions on what we should include in Enterprise Library for .NET Framework 3.0. The number of responses was overwhelming - thanks to everyone for sharing your ideas, and please keep them coming! Once we've had a chance to go through the list carefully and combine it with feedback from other sources, we'll share our proposed prioritized list before we start development.

In the comments to the original blog post, a pretty significant proportion of the "funding" was allocated to updating the User Interface Process Application Block (UIP) and including it in Enterprise Library. I can tell you now that it won't be included in the next release of Enterprise Library, but since it's obviously something that a lot of people were hoping for, we definitely owe you an explanation.

The main reason we won't be including it in the new release of EntLib is the same reason we didn't include it in the first place: it doesn't fit in with our definition of Enterprise Library. By this I mean that EntLib isn't an arbitrary collection of blocks - the blocks were chosen based on them being generally applicable to almost any style of .NET application. UIP does indeed contain some useful and valuable functionality, but since it is concerned only with client development, we didn't think it belonged in a general-purpose block library. This is the same reason why we didn't include the Composite UI Application Block or Offline Application Block in Enterprise Library.

So now the obvious question is: even if UIP won't be included in Enterprise Library, will it be updated? To answer that question, I'll refer you to Eugenio Pace who is the Product Manager of the client program in p&p. He's just posted a blog entry explaining our current plans for UIP. I know he'd love to get your feedback, so please let Eugenio know what you'd like to see in this area.