Microsoft Patterns & Practices releases Enterprise Library 4.1 and Unity Application Block 1.2

Microsoft Patterns & Practices announced the availability of Enterprise Library 4.1. Enterprise Library is a collection of reusable software components (application blocks) designed to assist software developers with common enterprise development challenges (such as logging, validation, caching, exception handling, and many others). Application blocks are a type of guidance encapsulating Microsoft recommended development practices.

According to this post, this release builds on the May release, with emphasis on consistency, extensibility, ease of use and integration. Along with bug fixes and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 support, the enhancements include

– Unity interception mechanism and integration of the Policy Injection Application Block with the Unity Application Block

– Added support for generics in the Unity Application Block

– Added support for arrays in the Unity Application Block

– Performance improvements

– Usability improvements to the configuration tool

The announcements noted that existing public APIs (v3.1 and v4.0) are still supported.

The release comes with QuickStart samples, Hands-On Labs, webcasts on Enterprise Library and Unity and demo code.

As is evident from the announcement some of the key enhancements in the release relate to the Unity Application Block 1.2. The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight, extensible dependency injection/ inversion of control (IOC) container. The Unity application block is also available as a standalone library. As noted above some of the improvements in the library are around better support for generics and arrays and performance.

The Unity release comes with quickstarts and webcasts that provide an Introduction to dependency injection with Unity and how to Extend the Unity dependency injection container. The project source is available at www.codeplex.com/unity and there is also a Codeplex project for Community Extensions.