VS2010 - New Features - Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 – April 2010

To save everyone some time I am simply re-listing the new features added to the Enterprise Library 5.0 release in April 2010 by Microsoft.  The full article can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff632023.aspx

New in the Enterprise Library 5.0

This major release of Enterprise Library contains many compelling new features and updates that will make developers more productive. There are no new blocks; instead the team focused on making the existing blocks shine, on testability, maintainability and learnability. The new features include:

• Major architectural refactoring that provides improved testability and maintainability through full support of the dependency injection style of development
• Dependency injection container independence (Unity ships with Enterprise Library, but you can replace Unity with a container of your choice)
• Programmatic configuration support, including a fluent configuration interface and an XSD schema to enable IntelliSense
• Redesign of the configuration tool to provide:
• A more usable and intuitive look and feel
• Extensibility improvements through meta-data driven configuration visualizations that replace the requirement to write design time code
• A wizard framework that can help to simplify complex configuration tasks
• Data accessors for more intuitive processing of data query results
• Asynchronous data access support
• Honoring validation attributes between Validation Application Block attributes and DataAnnotations
• Integration with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) validation mechanisms
• Support for complex configuration scenarios, including additive merge from multiple configuration sources and hierarchical merge
• Optimized cache scavenging
• Better performance when logging
• Support for the .NET 4.0 Framework and integration with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Improvements to Unity
• A reduction of the number of assemblies

The detailed list of all changes is included in the Enterprise Library documentation and also online.