With a view to promote enterprise development, enhance developer productivity, reduce development time, facilitate efficient code maintenance and rapid application development, the Patterns and Practices group from Microsoft has introduced a collection of extensible and configurable application blocks that are commonly known as the Enterprise Library Application Blocks.  These blocks are available for free download from Microsoft and are actually a collection of some reusable code snippets and code libraries that encapsulate some of the best coding and design strategies that are recommended by Microsoft.  The basic features provided by each of these blocks are:

·         Simplicity and ease of use

·         Extensibility as the source code for each of these blocks are available for free

·         Integration with other blocks

·         Consistency

Microsoft introduced the original Data Access Application Block in the month of April, 2002.  It became extremely popular and it paved the way for the design of the other blocks that comprise the Enterprise Application Block as we call it today.  The following are the versions of the Enterprise Library Application Blocks with their year and month of release.

1.    Enterprise Library 1.0 (January 2005)

2.    Enterprise Library 1.1 (June 2005)

3.    Enterprise Library 2.0 (January 2006)

This article discusses the features of each of the Enterprise Library Application Blocks briefly in a lucid language.