Validation Application Block in the January 2007 CTP

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Our team is hard at work putting the finishing touches on the January 2007 CTP of Enterprise Library 3.0. This new preview release will be available on our community site any day now, but in the meantime I wanted to tease you a bit by showing you a few things that will be available in this release of the newest member of the EntLib gang, the Validation Application Block:

Validator Library: We're very close to finishing all of the validators described in my earlier post. There are still a few rough edges we'll need to smooth out after this CTP, but overall this is a much more complete validator library, so you should be able to try out some much more interesting and realistic validation scenarios.

Configuration Tool Support. As with the previous CTP, you can attach validators to objects using either attributes or configuration. But configuration is so much more fun now that the block works in the tool!

 

ASP.NET Integration: Validating your business objects from ASP.NET pages is now essentially a code-free experience. The January 2007 CTP includes a "PropertyProxyValidator" control, which locates the validation rules defined on a object property (in either attributes or configuration) and uses this to validate data in a control.

WinForms Integration: In addition to the ASP.NET integration, we have a very similar story for Windows Forms integration. The new ValidationProvider extender control lets you specify which object is supplying the validation rules, and each control can be attached to the validators from a specific property. The ValidationProvider also integrates with the ErrorProvider control, allowing you to build highly festive forms with lots of blinky things.

QuickStarts and Documentation: While the code and unit tests are all you hard-core coders need, we have a couple of QuickStarts and an early draft of the documentation which should make it a bit easier for the rest of us to figure out what this block is all about.

I hope this gives you an idea of what to expect - we're working hard to get the next CTP out to you very soon, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts once you've had a change to play with it for yourselves.