Book Review: Effective Use of Enterprise Library

I haven’t made it all the way through this book, but thought I’d go ahead and scratch out a quick review on it anyway.

Effective Use of Microsoft Enterprise Library by Len Fenster.  Addison-Wesley, 2006, ISBN 0321334213.

This book covers the June, 2005 release of Enterprise Library, but it’s still a worthwhile read.  It’s concise and clearly written, and it’s well-structured with each chapter laying out the background, design, and usage of a particular library block such as Configuration, Data, or Logging.  The examples are in both C# and Visual Basic, and the examples are to the point and usable instead of some throw-away, unrealistic snippet.

Fenster does a nice job of talking about the configuration advantages of EL blocks, such as the ability to define your logging in code, yet have an administrator use configuration files to control how and where logs are actually handled.

I’ve found this book a solid intro to Enterprise Library, even though it’s already outdated.  It’s a good starting point for reading before jumping into the docs for the latest release of EL.