Advantages and disadvantages of using Enterprise Library
Im just starting a project and since this project is personal I was wondering what are the advantages of using Enterprise Library? We use the version 2 for several projects in the office but im not quite sure (aside of the good practices) of the advantages of it, especially in the database component. Any advice? Thanks
Answer
For the database application block, the main advantage is that it makes it easier to produce database-agnostic code. The developer interacts mainly with generic Database and DbCommand objects, rather than eg SqlConnection, SqlCommand, etc. Thus, switching to a different database (ie Oracle) becomes more feasible. Depending on your business needs, this could be a definite advantage. EntLib also gently prods the developer in the direction of using DbParameter for query parameters, which reduces the risk of SQL injection attacks.
As another poster mentionned, the data app block is somewhat higher-level than the straight ADO.NET classes, so it tends to require fewer lines of code to do the same thing.
From my point of view, the data, exception and logging blocks are the most useful. Exception and Logging together make it very easy to log exceptions (duh) to a number of places and in a number of formats. For example, they can put the entire exception log entry, including the stack trace, in the Windows event log making it relatively easy to diagnose a problem.
One disadvantage of EntLib is that some app blocks place quite a bit of logic into configuration files. So your logic is more spread out; some of it is in code, some in config files. The upside is that the configuration can be modified post-build and even post-deployment.