The Tulsa .NET Users Group had the very great privilege of hosting Ron Jacobs for an excellent presentation on the Enterprise Library (formerly known as Application Blocks). You can get his power point slides from his site at RonJacobs.com.
I remember at least a few years ago taking my first look at the Data Access Block and at the time didn't think I would have much use with it. Because back then, it seemed like it did little more than offer a few methods to easily execute SQL commands and some data layer abstraction.
Well, it has come a long way and I intend to really begin utilizing the complete Enterprise Library now! It's free code (Open Source?) and gives every developer an extra layer to add on top of the framework to make our lives much easier!
After delivering an inspiring quick demonstration and discussion of what the Enterprise Library is today and how it can help us now, he then showed us an early version of the Guidance Automation Toolkit! This tool integrates into Visual Studio 2005 seamlessly and provides several wizards to generate Classes for both the Data Access Layer and the Business Objects. (Think templates and auto generated code, hmmm... Beginning to sound like Code Smith.) But, it's free, with source code (Open Source?), based on the ASP.NET scripting/text templating, just like Code Smith and you don't have to Copy and Paste from Code Smith into your actual classes!
Just another one of the many reasons to look forward to November 7 and the final release!