Microsoft Enterprise Library consists of reusable software components that are designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. It includes a collection of functional application blocks addressing specific cross-cutting concerns such as data access, logging, or validation; and wiring blocks, Unity and the Interception/Policy Injection Application Block, designed to help implement more loosely coupled, testable, and maintainable software systems.
Different applications have different requirements, and you will find that not every application block is useful in every application that you build. Before using an application block, you should have a good understanding of your application requirements and of the scenarios that the application block is designed to address.
Microsoft Enterprise Library 6 contains the following application blocks:
- Data Access Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate standard database functionality in their applications, including both synchronous and asynchronous data access and returning data in a range of formats.
- Exception Handling Application Block. Developers and policy makers can use this application block to create a consistent strategy for processing exceptions that occur throughout the architectural layers of enterprise applications.
- Logging Application Block. Developers can use this application block to include logging functionality for a wide range of logging targets in their applications. This release adds asynchronous logging capabilities.
- Policy Injection Application Block. Powered by the Interception mechanism built into Unity, this application block can be used to implement interception policies to streamline the implementation of common features, such as logging, caching, exception handling, and validation, across a system.
- Semantic Logging Application Block. This application block provides a set of destinations (sinks) to persist application events published using a subclass of the EventSource class from the System.Diagnostics.Tracing namespace. Sinks include Windows Azure table storage, SQL Server databases, and flat files with several formats and rolling capabilities. Developers can extend the block by creating custom formatters and sinks. For those sinks that can store structured data, the block preserves the full structure of the event payload in order to facilitate analyzing or processing the logged data. Events can be persisted in-process or collected and persisted out-of-process in a separate service.
- Transient Fault Handling Application Block. This application block makes on-premises or cloud applications more resilient to transient failures by providing intelligent retry logic mechanisms.
- Unity Application Block. Developers can use this application block as a lightweight and extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection, as well as instance and type interception. This release adds support for Windows Store apps as well as the registration by convention feature to ease the task of configuring Unity.
- Validation Application Block. Developers can use this application block to create validation rules for business objects that can be used across different layers of their applications.
Enterprise Library also includes a set of core functions for declarative configuration support.