EL.The.First.Look

The Enterprise Library has been available for quite a while now since January 2005 and a lot of people have been looking at it. It was developed based on Avanade's ACA.NET - kinda boombastique stuff I must say. Recently, there has been a lot of talk about it in the SGDOTNET forums, and since I'm curious about it; and since I have installed it for months and have not looked at it; and since the current system in my office is using an old version of the DAAB that is part of it now; and since I wanted to learn something new ...

I've decided to study it in detail today. My first focus was the Data Access Application Block (DAAB) since I'm more familiar with data-related stuff. I must say that it is quite well-written but I was expecting more than just wrapper methods. Nevertheless, it still can be very useful for application development. It piggy-backs on the Configuration Application Block for managing the information in .config files. Specifying configuration information is easy by using the available Configuration tool.

I read the whole documentation of the DAAB, studied some of it's source codes and looked at the quickstart examples. Then I did some practical:

Database db = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase("LocalServer");
DBCommandWrapper dbw = db.GetSqlStringCommandWrapper("SELECT * FROM Categories");
DataSet ds = db.ExecuteDataset(dbw);
dataGrid1.DataSource = ds;

That is all to it and the code works. However, I find the execution a little slow. I then compared it against Paladin:

CategoriesList catList = new CategoriesList();
BusinessComponent bc = new BusinessComponent();
bc.Populate(catList);
dataGrid1.DataSource = catList;

To my surprise, Paladin runs faster. But anyway, I heard they will release a more optimized version sometime this month and hopefully, it will perform better.

The other tasks such as insertion, updating and deletion will require quite substantial amount of coding. But it is understandable since it is only providing convenient wrapper methods and not OPF capabilities. The Data Mapping Application Block that is currently in the planning stage should be more OPF-like and more interesting.

I guessed I will be looking at the Caching Application Block next.