You are holding in your hands a book that will make your life as an enterprise developer a whole lot easier.

It’s a guide on Microsoft Enterprise Library and it’s meant to guide you through how to apply .NET for enterprise development. Enterprise Library, developed by the patterns & practices group, is a collection of reusable components, each addressing a specific cross cutting concern—be it system logging, or data validation, or exception management. Many of these can be taken advantage of easily. These components are architecture agnostic and can be applied in a multitude of different contexts.

The book walks you through functional blocks of the Enterprise Library, which include data access, caching, cryptography, exception handling, logging, security, and validation. It contains a large collection of exercises, tricks and tips.

Developing robust, reusable, and maintainable application requires knowledge of design patterns, software architectures and solid coding skills. We can help you develop those skills with Enterprise Library since it encapsulates proven and recommended practices of developing enterprise applications on the .NET platform. Though this guide does not go into the depth of discussions of architecture and patterns, it provides a solid basis for you to discover and implement these patterns from a reusable set of components.

That’s why I also encourage you to check out the Enterprise Library source code and read it.

This guide is not meant to be a complete reference on Enterprise Library. For that, you should go to MSDN. Instead, the guide covers most commonly used scenarios and illustrates how Enterprise Library can be applied in implementing those. The powerful message manifesting from the guide is the importance of code reuse. In today’s world of complex large software systems, high-quality pluggable components are a must. After all, who can afford to write and then maintain dozens of different frameworks in a system— all to accomplish the same thing? Enterprise Library allows you to take advantage of the proven code complements to manage a wide range of task and leaves you free to concentrate on the core business logic and other “working parts” of your application.