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Microsoft Enterprise Library 4.1
My first job working as a developer for a really large multinational software corporation was where I first discovered the power of enterprise libraries. The senior developers had taken the time to write out security libraries, an orm mapper and data access layer, etc... However, at some point there was a management change and whith the new leadership in place the question was raised, "Why did we build these frameworks when there are readily available frameworks that have already been subjected to the development community for hardening?"
The senior level developers tried to convince the new management that what we built was better than what was already out there. I will not attempt to argue that point, but I will argue that from a business standpoint the decision was a bad one because there was no competitive advantage added to our product. It cost a lot of money in senior level developer salaries to develop something that was already available, was free, and which to any of our customers would have been transparent.
At my next job the Application Developement Manager didn't understand frameworks and when it came time to building a mission critical enterprise application he gave me carte blanche to choose the architecture-framework. Remembering the lessons learned at my previous job and knowing we were on an extremely tight schedule I choose to use the Microsoft Enterprise Libraries.
There are many great reasons to use the Microsoft Enterprise Libraries, such as they are currently under control of the Microsoft Patterns and Practices team, they are free, they are available for scrutiny to the development community, and a mid level developer would find them fairly easy to implement.
This section of my website is going to focus on the benefits of each of the application blocks and how to setup your applications to take advantage of the benefits provided by each library.