EntLib vNext teaser

We have started exploration and experimentation on a new project -- Windows Azure Integration Pack for Enterprise Library. Our product vision is:

For .NET developers, architects, testers, and IT/Pros

building, extending and maintaining LOB applications powered by Windows Azure-hosted or on-premises services,

Windows Azure Integration Pack for Microsoft Enterprise Library

will provide guidance and reusable components designed to encapsulate recommended practices which facilitate consistency, extensibility, reliability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, ease of use, and integration. The pack will help:

• • support Microsoft’s drive to make Windows Azure the cloud computing platform of choice.
  • address the needs of those who would like to move and extend their LOB applications that are already effectively leveraging Enterprise Library to Windows Azure.

The patterns & practices team has been providing guidance about moving on-premises applications to the cloud and developing new applications, optimized for the cloud. The work is ongoing to update these guides and corresponding samples to accommodate the evolution of the platform .

In the meantime, we are planning to carry forward from where the previous cloud guides end. We will “librarify” (my editor would probably slap me for this word, but you get the meaning :) some of the examples and provide more guidance on advanced scenarios. The objective is to provide a coherent story.

With regards to Enterprise Library, the good news is that we do not need to do any porting since most application blocks simply work on Windows Azure. A little bit of fine-tuning may be required. Instead, our focus will be on new challenges and patterns, which may emerge as brand new blocks. Some areas we’ve been investigating include:

• • handling retries of operations that failed because of transient issues;
  • batch processing and policy-based scheduling (including support of the Scheduler-Agent-Supervisor pattern)
  • diagnostics/logging
  • configuration support
  • resource optimization and auto-scaling

By no means does the above constitute our product backlog. We are just identifying opportunities for the new release. It would help if you could answer this short survey and invite others to participate and help us understand your needs so we can focus our efforts for the most impact.