I have just started to play with the Enterprise Library bits. I've been approaching this as an excercise in seeing how much I can get out of EL with as little work as possible. I am by no means an expert (only Configuration Management and Logging explored so far) and my feelings may certainly change, but here are some early impressions:
- GOOD: The Enterprise Library Configuration Tool is a fantastic addition. Being able to visually set up the various EL components is great. Kudos for adding this. There have been a few oddities here or there, but nothing worth crying about considering the net value of the tool.
- FAIR: The sheer number of configuration files needed to run EL. I guess this isn't really a bad thing since you are hidden from them for the most part, but for some reason I like having fewer config files rather than more. It would have been nice to have a single config file for an app rather than four or five.
- BAD: The Configuration Management Block requires you to have a unique config file for each unique "Section" of configuration information. Think of how you could add sections to your app.config file. Well, each of those will be its own config file under Config Management unless you come up with some kind of custom serialization/deserialiation approach. This may be as simple as creating an object tree or using a DataSet, but it would have been nice to be able to just stuff multiple objects into a single config file. Maybe I am missing something.
- FAIR+: Documentation is pretty good. I generally dislike most documentation for how it is put together (I just think differently than most I guess) but this is not bad, especially as compared to other doc efforts for add-on stuff
Exception Handling is up next. At some point I hope to get into the other blocks as well. I'm also considering putting together some "video blogcasts" or perhaps just videos to show real simple "get it running" examples of EL.
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