BOF: Using Enterprise Library in Real Life

I attended the BOF (Birds of a Feather) session on Entlib tonight.  I had plans to go to another BOF session that was before the Entlib one, but I got there late because I was eating and once I got in it just didn’t capture my attention.

The EntLib discussion was pretty decent.  There was a developer from Avanade that help write the EntLib 1.0 stuff as the moderator.  He pretty much just opened the floor up for comments and questions.  It seemed that just about everyone in the room (probably 40 people or so) was using Entlib.  There was some discussion on how to deploy it, who was maintaining it, etc.

Some key things I thought were interesting:

• There were a consensus that people didn’t feel like the community around EntLib was as strong as some other open source communities.  They felt that there weren’t enough community extensions.  I personally think this stems from that it was released from Microsoft and many people just take it as is to work with, or feel that Microsoft should be providing extensions, etc. 
• People were working on how best to expose EntLib to developers.  Do they provide a wrapper?  Do they provide a single binary drop, or let the developers have the code to recompile and change themselves?  How do they provide standards for using EntLib?  At the client I’m at one of the lead developers there put together a nice Enterprise Template for VB.Net.  They create new class libraries and web application projects that contained all the Entlib blocks the company was going to use, along with sample code on how to use them (or any wrappers).  I may have a blog post on how this was done in a week or so when I get back from PDC and have time to get detailed with it. 
• There was the statement that there has been a fundamental change in that previously the PAG (or Patterns and Practices group as they are known externally) would generate a reference framework after the release of the platform.  Now, with the release of EntLib, many customers are stating that they will not move to Whidbey unless EntLib for 2.0 is released as well.  While I’m sure this is actually a small amount of customers, they are Enterprise level customers and will probably draw quite a bit of attention.

I did meet a .Net Evangelist from the Royal Bank of Canada.  He seemed very interested in extensions of VS.Net that would help aid the 800+ developers in his organization to more easily use Entlib.

Things like the Enterprise Template intrigued him, but he also had the idea of incorporating the configuration manager into VS.Net so that only one tool was needed to develop.  Interestingly enough, ACA.Net 2.x had a plug in for VS.Net that was a configuration manager, but the implementation wasn’t that great and it attempted to use a “property” type window to work with the configuration.  I found that I just used the separate config manager instead.  Perhaps with the right implementation it would work though.

Well, that’s about it.  I"m back at the hotel now and it appears that while the convention center power came back on within 30 minutes, the power has been out at the hotel most of the day.  I’ve typed the above blog in the dark, or rather the glow of my LCD panel.  Strangely enough some of the hotel had power so the wireless was working.  Anyway, the power has just come back on, so time to finish up, plug in all my batteries for tomorrow and recharge my own battery by sleeping.