EntLib Presentation...

Last night I attended the CINNUG meeting and heard a great overview presentation about Enterprise Library.  The talk was given by Doug Rohrer (an ex-fellow employee who is still working for Avanade).  Due to his employer Doug has been working with the Pre releases of Enterprise Library for several months now, and that doesn’t include his exposure to the EntLib predecessor ACA.Net. 

The overview was really good and he showed some code from all the blocks I think.  I think it is hard to come up with an hour’s worth of material on something large as EntLib while still keeping it technical enough for geeks to enjoy and not come off looking like a marketing presentation.

Doug promises to have all this code and slides up on his blog by the end of the week, so if you missed the meeting make sure to grab his bits and slides.  If you haven’t looked into EntLib quick starts then his code my throw you a bit; Doug definitely wrote almost production worthy code into his demo so a lot of what you see in the code could be considered fluff for a demo and goes beyond just using the EntLib blocks.  Unfortunately I think this tended to overcast the presentation a bit as he ended up explaining some of the things he did in the code that were good coding practices, but not directly pertinent to EntLib.  I would say that you could get some good pointers on how to write good code from it though.

Doug has also indicated he will be writing some blog entries on some more advanced topics with EntLib.  Most likely the first ones will be on advanced configuration as it sounds like he has done quite a bit with it in his current project.

On a side note, the meeting turned out to be an impromptu Ex-GA Sullivan reunion.  There were about eight people there who were former employees of GA Sullivan/Avanade.  There was even a cameo by the other Mike Wood from Avanade.