.NET User Group Meeting in Colombo today

It’s another which brings along yet another user group meeting. This month I’ll be taking the stage after a long lapse of over six months to talk about the newly released application blocks in the Enterprise Library. From my point of view the Enterprise Library is a must know for any .NET developer worth his salt i.e. if you’re an enterprise developer though, but who isn’t these days ;).

Obviously I wouldn’t have enough time to cover all the blocks in a two hour session, so what I’m planning to do is to do an overview of all seven blocks but get into coding demos of only the Data Access, Exception Handling, Logging and Instrumentation and either Configuration or Cryptography application blocks. If you think I’ve left out a block that you’re terribly interested about, leave a comment and we’ll see if we can squeeze it in.

Here’s a teaser on what you will be learning today.

Enterprise Library is the next generation of the patterns & practices Application Blocks.  The Enterprise Library is designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges and it delivers the most widely used blocks in a single integrated package. The vision at Microsoft is to build a broad community of customers and partners using, sharing and extending their own Application Blocks that are consistent with and integrate into the patterns & practices Enterprise Library.

Data Access: Why not leverage existing knowledge when designing your next solution? Discover how you can implement the recommended data access architecture using Enterprise Library to quickly build a robust and secure data access layer which supports connectivity to Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and DB2.

Exception Handling: Exceptions happen...the question is what you will do to handle them.  Poorly written applications behave unpredictably when exceptions occur and often this bad behavior results in crashes or security holes.  You will learn how you can create exception policies that can be consistently and quickly applied in your application to insure predictability even when things go wrong.

Logging and Instrumentation: Properly instrumented applications are a dream to manage, they tell what is happening and when things are going wrong point you to the source of the problem quickly increasing your mean time to recovery resulting in increased system availability.  Learn how to use the Enterprise Library logging and instrumentation block to consistently and easily build an application that tells you where it hurts.

Crypto: So you have a secret...what are you going to do with that credit card number, connection string or password?  Stuff in a secret place and hope that no one ever finds it?  Of course not, you want to encrypt it.  But how?  With the Enterprise Library cryptography block you can quickly encrypt and decrypt these secrets allowing you to secure them and sleep better at night. Attend today’s presentation to find out how.

Configuration: Configuration data is a constant challenge for application development because the way in which your application handles configuration data dramatically impacts its manageability.  We will discuss the requirements for building a great configuration system and how you can leverage the configuration application block to meet these requirements.