Santosh Benjamin

Foiled by Enterprise Library

Hmm.. Its the season of the whinge for lil ol me. No product likes me using it. I've got into a fight with Enterprise Library now. When we used it with BizTalk, the data block refused to work. It read the BTSNTSVC.exe.config file and seemed to pick up the loggingConfiguration file, but said that it couldnt load the config handler!! [Yes, we strong named it, GACed it, ensured the build version was correct and not 1.0.* and that the publick key name was present in the config file - all to no avail].

We got round that temporarily since we could afford to stick the component behind a web service and with the info in the web.config file, the block worked fine [In the final scheme of things, that component will indeed be a remote service so this approach is fine] . For another DB interacting DLL which we had to call directly from BizTalk, we just avoided the block altogether and wrote our own Data access layer.

Anyway, i happily installed the new release(June 05) of Ent Lib and the hands on labs and decided to check out the Logging block since we are going to use that next (and there is a good article by Andy Morrison on the same, i just need to understand the basics of Ent Lib logging first before leaping headlong into logging with BTS and EntLib together).

You can guess what happened next. Thats right. It refused to work. I got this weird error message saying that the "loggingConfiguration" section could not be found in the exe.config or the machine.config !! The stupid thing is supposed to look for the loggingConfiguration file in the bin folder, not look for a section in the exe.config file or the machine.config file.

I'm getting sick of this. Config management, logging and data access are key to my solution. Anyway, config management can be done by using the SSO (Jon Flanders and Scott Colestock have discussed it in their blogs), so i guess i'll just roll my own blocks. I cant afford to waste my time hunting down bugs in Ent Lib or any lib.