I will literally have to force myself to go to bed and stop playing with Enterprise Library 3.0 tonight :)

If you haven't heard, the first CTP was released a few hours ago and they moved it to CodePlex. You can download it from here. Tom provides a good overview on his blog.

If you are new to Enterprise Library in general, I have a lot of  Enterprise Library 2.0 Tutorials that I have written over the past year on just about every application block. I am guessing that most of the code examples and information still apply, but I am just now working through all the changes and enhancements that version 3.0 brings to the table and more will occur until it is officially released. I am starting to build up a collection of Enterprise Library 3.0 Tutorials, too, focusing mainly on the new enhancements and blocks.

Visual Studio-Integrated Configuration Editor

Right off the bat, I am really, really impressed with the new Visual Studio Integrated Configuration Editor. If you work with Enterprise Library a lot you will appreciate the fact that you no longer need to switch back and forth between the GUI Configuration Tool to make configuration changes and Visual Studio to code. Note the stand-alone configuration tool is still there if you prefer it, but the VS integrated version is such a blessing.

You can read more about it in detail here

• Enterprise Library 3.0 - Visual Studio-Integrated Configuration Editor

but I at least wanted to show off a couple of cool images which are worth a thousand words-

And if you think that is cool, you also have encryption and decryption of configuration sections built-in via the click of a drop-down menu:

If you spend anytime with Enterprise Library, you have to think that is cool!

by David Hayden