The Patterns & Practices team at Microsoft are a very busy bunch and it can be difficult to keep up with what they're working on. To help get the word out, Ron Jacobs, Tom Hollander, Eugenio Pace and Don Smith yesterday conducted the first of what will be quarterly "What are we up to?" webcasts.
You can now view the webcast at your leisure by visiting http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-us&EventID=1032282437&CountryCode=US
Some nuggets of information from the webcast include the Enterprise Library 2.0 status:
- The current CTP (August) is available from http://practices.gotdotnet.com/projects/entlib
- It runs with VS2005 Beta 2, but not currently wit the later RC builds
- It is missing a few key features and is good for prototyping, but is not recommended for production purposes
- Next release slated to coincide with the November 7th VS2005 launch.
- Expected to be a feature-complete "high-quality preview" release
- Full, final release planned for one month later (early December)
Keep your eyes out for other interesting projects like the Line-of-Business Application Toolkit (expected Mid-2006) and the Web User Interface Process application block. I'm especially interested in the WUIP because it is an updated web-app-only version of the UIP block intended to address the need for web applications to support Model/View/Controller (MVC) pattern. P&P have also indicated it may be based on the Windows Workflow Foundation, recently announced at PDC.
Good stuff! Keep it coming, guys!
-Chris