While developing enterprise-scale applications, developers often find themselves focusing on mundane and repeated tasks generally referred to as cross-cutting concerns: tasks such as writing repeated data access code, logging exceptions, handling and managing exceptions, caching data, validating user input, and so on. Although these tasks are important, developers often spend a lot of time implementing and debugging these cross-cutting concerns rather than channeling their efforts towards the core business requirements of customers. Developing this functionality in-house, as flexible and customizable reusable components, is one option but it involves time and money, not to mention the testing and bug-fixing effort.

This book will give you insight into Microsoft Enterprise Library, show you how to leverage the individual functional application blocks, and equip you with the knowledge to be productive in your work. Before embarking on the learning journey, read this chapter to get introduced to Enterprise Library; all other chapters are self contained so it doesn't matter whether you read the book sequentially or flip to a specific functional application block chapter with the intent to quickly get up to speed and leverage that specific functional application block.

In this chapter, you will: