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Microsoft Enterprise Library:Part-I

What is Enterprise Library?


Set of STANDARD libraries to extend the REUSABILITY concept. Put in simple words, the code blocks that provides a set of best practices and patterns that can be customized as per the needs. Consider writing an application where Data Access is required, you will definitely write a Data Access class. How about having a class already available to you that can be used as is or if the need be, customized easily. Microsoft has grouped all these libraries into one package and calls it Enterprise Library.

Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 contains the following application blocks:

Caching Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate a cache in their applications. Pluggable cache providers and persistent backing stores are supported.

Cryptography Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate hashing and symmetric encryption in their applications.

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 further improves logging performance.

Policy Injection Application Block. Powered by the Interception mechanism built in 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.

Security Application Block. Developers can use this application block to incorporate authorization and security caching functionality in their applications.

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.

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, including configuration and instrumentation, and object lifecycle management. These functions are used by all other application blocks.



This Library (along with the source code) can be downloaded from here.


Although the download contains self explanatory documentation, I felt the need to explore it a bit.

Let us start with the one of the basic requirements that every application has- the Validation


Validation Application Block:

The Enterprise Library Validation Application Block as described in MSDN is: “Enterprise Library Validation Application Block provides a library of classes, called valuators, that supplies the code for validating .NET Framework data types”

Good to know concepts:

There are two special types of validator, which are an aggregation of other validators.

1. AndCompositeValidator: All valuators that are in this composition needs to be true for this validator to be true(nothing special, typical AND functionality)

2. OrCompositeValidator: At least one of the validators in the composition needs to be true for this Validator to be true.

Rule Set: a number of validators grouped together forms a rule-set and allows developers to validate a complex object or graph by composing different validators of different types and applying them to elements in the object graph.

Ways to perform Validation and create Rule Sets

1. Using configuration

2. Using attributes

3. Using code

Technologies supported by Validation Block

1. ASP.NET

2. Windows Forms

3. Windows Communications Framework (WCF)

4. Windows Presentation foundation(WPF)


Let us consider an example of validating the length of the string to be between 0-20 chars.

This is done in Validation Block like this.

[StringLengthValidator(0, 20)]

public string CustomerName;

public Pradeep(string customerName)

{

this.CustomerName = customerName;

}


Source Code for this article  is attahed here that demonstrates this functionality.

Remaining application blocks will be covered in the subsequent posts.



Till Next we connect….



Happy Learning!

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