Dan Rigsby - Coding Up Style

It looks like the Patterns and Practices team at Microsoft has exposed the product backlog for Enterprise Library 4.0 out on codeplex.  The major new item is the Dependency Injection Application Block (DIAB) which is geared up as a more complete alternative to Spring.Net, StructureMap, Castle Windsor, and other dependency injection frameworks.  The nice thing about this is that the base implementation of DIAB can be swapped out with one of the other engines to allow a lot more flexibility. It will  support for containers and both declarative and imperative configuration.  Jeremy Miller gives a much better introduction to DIAB than I ever could. It will be interesting to watch the progress they make with this and what will happen to ObjectBuilder which is already a “lightweight” dependency injection framework that is used in Enterprise Library and the Composite UI Application Block (CAB). We use EntLib 3.1 and CAB extensively, so we have a vested interest in this.

Here are a few other items in the list that I am interested in:

1. Provide extensibility points for Caching Block to allow alternate caching implementations (including distributed cache providers) to be plugged in. The objective here is NOT to replace the ASP.NET caching but to provide more choices.
2. Improve performance of the Logging Block by optimizing text formatter (lazy formatting in case of the local logger, and eager formatting in case of the remote logger).
3. Provide more descriptive error messages.
4. LAB: allow finer-grained local filters in the config tool.
5. Hands-on Labs: Validation Block, Policy Injection Block, Dependency Injection Block.
6. Allow to run multiple rulesets in Validation block.