[Via Patrick & Scott] Enterprise Library will be released January 28th. More information can be found on this GotDotNet Workspace. It seems that a lot of people are waiting to get their hands on and start using it on projects.
Enterprise Library is a major new release of the patterns & practices Application Blocks. This guidance is designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Enterprise Library 1.0 will include blocks for Data Access, Exception Handling, Caching, Configuration, Logging & Instrumentation, Security and Cryptography, in a single integrated download. The Library will feature improved consistency, extensibility, integration and ease of use, and will include a GUI-based configuration editing tool, generally eliminating the need to hand-edit XML configuration files for the blocks. This workspace provides a forum for the community to discuss Enterprise Library, review prerelease materials and provide suggestions for upcoming versions.
[Updated] More detailed information on EntLib is available in the February 2005 edition of the Patterns & Practices Digest. PDF Download.
Besides some other good reads the February 2005 Edition of MSDN Magazine contains a good article on how to get customers involved in the testing process: Get Your Customers Involved in the Testing Process with Functional Tests in Excel.
This article discusses:
Why you need to do functional testing as well as structural testing (NUnit)
How to improve the communication value of specification documents by having customers test the code using FIT
WinFITRunnerLite, a program that allows Excel files to be executed as functional tests of your software
A sample development episode showing how to test software using FIT and WinFITRunnerLite
My experience with acceptance tests (aka customer tests) is that it requires familiarity of the developers and project lead with a number of extreme programming techniques like unit testing, acceptance tests and refactoring. In particular the combination of unit tests, pair programming and refactoring recommends itself to that end and integrates well in almost every development process.
If you want to get started with acceptance testing have a look at FIT and FitNesse. Both are acceptance testing frameworks that enable users and user representatives to write acceptance tests via a spreadsheet-like approach.