Application Blocks

[Steven Nagy]

Hi All,

I just wanted some feedback about which Application blocks people are
using and why.
Are they worth the time to learn? Do they increase development speed
over time?

I just want your general feedback.
I am going to do the tutorials on the Security Application Block this
weekend to see if its useful. But there's many more and I want to know
what real gain people might be getting out of them.

Cheers,
Steve

 

[Nicholas Paldino [.NET/C# MVP]]

Steve,

Personally, I have found the data application block invaluable. It
makes things like calling stored procedures very easy (especially with
parameter lookup and whatnot). It saves a good deal of hand-coding for me.

 

[David Hernandez Diez]

Applications blocks are really helpful, they are the implementation of
patterns and best practices and also they have been tested by a lot of
people.

(They have released many versions, the latest one is the Enterprise
Library January 2006 for .NET 2.0)

They have learned from its previous versions enhancing the code in all
the aspects (flexibility, performance, security ...) The code is
excellent and really easy to understand, if it doesn't cover your
specific necessities you can modify (or extend) it as you wish.

Highly recommendable.

 

[Steven Nagy]

I was looking at that too, but we have our own custom data assembly for
abstracting the whole multiple database thing, profiles, etc. It also
supports stored procedures as well. On a personal basis I might use
that block though...

Anyone have any specific instances of the Security Application Block?
Particularly Active Directory in relation to web sites...

 

[john smith]

I was looking at that too, but we have our own custom data assembly for
abstracting the whole multiple database thing, profiles, etc. It also
supports stored procedures as well. On a personal basis I might use
that block though...

Anyone have any specific instances of the Security Application Block?
Particularly Active Directory in relation to web sites...

We did have a good look at it, but we decided against it. Our main
interest was in the DAAB, but we didn't really like it. We liked the
other blocks much better, but we already have other similar things in
use instead (like log4net instead of the logging block, etc). They
looked nice, but not enough to make us switch everything (we wouldn't
have gained much from using them).

About the DAAB...

-Too MS SQL centric (even though that's the RDBMS we use the most) -
that might have changed in the new versions though
-We didn't like the syntax/usage whatsoever
-It does speed up development a little bit, but NOWHERE near as much as
using code generation tools with our templates (and we much prefer the
end result too). Our generated code tends to contain less bugs (rarely
any) compared to hand-coded stuff (which is using the DAAB). Although we
could make a template that makes use of the DAAB, but that seemed
backwards (saves no time, a syntax we don't like, extra overhead, way
more complicated, extra dependancies, etc)
-Doesn't perform as well as our old code (not exactly stellar in our tests)
-Feels too sproc oriented (it works perfecly with text queries, but it
just didn't "feel right"... hard to explain)

I can't remember all the reasons as it has been a while since we tried
it, but I'm sure you'll get the idea anyways. It's worth looking at it,
but it's not the ultimate solution to everything either. I have no plans
to use the DAAB anytime soon (ever?), but I just may use some of the
other blocks in an upcoming project.

 

[Steven Nagy]

Thanks for the responses everyone.