Skip to main content

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!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Authentication using Social Networking portals(Facebook, Gmail, and Yahoo)

There are tons of sites, which offer sign on using the social networking site credentials (Facebook, gtalk, twitter and the list continues).It can be termed a “SINGLE SIGNON” and offers a lot of benefits compared to traditional database authentication approach. However, not storing user credentials in the DB imposes an additional risk. How to track who all logged into the system. Now the question is, which approach to follow. The best approach is to use inbuilt asp.net users for storing the logging info about user activities and using single signon technique for authentication. This article will explore the approach and provide the details of implementation using some third party libraries and customizing it to the requirements. The Authentication will be done using the following networking portals Yahoo  Gmail Facebook    Special thanks to my friend Sumit Khandelwal, for implementation of Facebook part (in fact he did it all!!) Except Facebook, all other ca...
2 comments
Read more

WPF Overview-Part-II

This post is in continuation to the last post. In this Post I’ll be exploring the Dependency Properties Dependency properties are similar to CLR properties with more advanced and complex features. The main difference between the CLR properties and dependency properties is, that the value of a normal .NET property is read directly from a private member in your class, whereas the value of a DependencyProperty is resolved dynamically when calling the GetValue() method that is inherited from DependencyObject . In case this description did not make sense, no need to worry, It will become clear by the time you reach end of this article. How the Value is Resolved in Dependency properties Every time a dependency property is accessed, it internally resolves the value by following the precedence from high to low. It checks if a local value is available, if not, check if a custom style trigger is active and I the similar manner continues until it finds a value. At last the default value is alwa...
Post a Comment
Read more

Asp.Net 4.0: An Overview-Part-III

This is the last post in the series which will explore the following new features of ASP.Net 4.0  Performance Monitoring for Individual Applications in a Single Worker Process Web.config File Refactoring Permanently Redirecting a Page Expanding the Range of Allowable URLs Performance Monitoring for Individual Applications in a Single Worker Process It is a common practice to host multiple ASP.NET applications in a single worker process, In order to increase the number of Web sites that can be hosted on a single server. This practice results in difficulties for server administrators to identify an individual application that is experiencing problems. ASP.NET 4 introduces new resource-monitoring functionality introduced by the CLR. To enable this functionality, following XML configuration snippet is added to the aspnet.config configuration file.(This file is located in the directory where the .NET Framework is installed ) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8...
Post a Comment
Read more