Dotmad.net

For Hebrew speakers only, Guy Burstein recorded several short (7-15 minutes) screencasts showing some of the application blocks inside EntLib 3:

1. Logging application block
2. Exception handling AB
3. Validation AB
4. Policy injection AB

For English speakers, I found several screencasts here.

And there is also a new Team System screencast site: “How do I?“.

I have been reading another post war (I bet Oren really enjoys them) between Oren Eini and Chris Holmes.
It started with Oren dissing Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices team, followed up with Chris’s post and Oren’s reply.

I find it difficult to understand Oren. Sometimes he’d rather write his own code from scratch (Rhino mocks), but he keeps preaching the use of known OSS solutions, such as Rails, NHibernate, or the Castle project.
But it’s really strange to hear someone like that, always trying new tools, complaining CAB is too complex to explain, or that it contains too many features.
Is Rails or Castle the “simplest solution possible“? It seems to me that for an Asp.Net developer the simplest solution is keep coding the way he knows, and avoid learning Rails, as well as dealing with the performance issues.

Can I write my own mini-implementation of CAB? probably.
Can I write my own mini-implementation of O/R mapping? probably again.
Is it the smart thing to do? I doubt it.

The Composite UI Application Block, created by Microsoft’s patterns & practices team, is a reusable, source code–based component based on the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.
It provides proven practices to build complex smart client user interfaces based on well known design patterns such as the Composite pattern, in which simple user interface parts can be combined to create complex solutions, but at the same time allowing these parts to be independently developed, tested, and deployed.
In other words, it separates UI related logic and the business logic behind it to separate classes, making it easier to test and refactor you BL code without touching the UI and the other way around.
As it turns out, there is a WIKI resource on the subject, called CABpedia.