Over the weekends I've been tinkering around with Microsoft's recently released Enterprise Library and wrote an article focusing on the Data Access Application Block in the Enterprise Library for this week's 4Guys article: Working with the Enterprise Library's Data Access Application Block. This is my second article on the Enterprise Library, the first being a general introduction piece: An Introduction to the Microsoft Enterprise Library. (For those in San Diego who are interested in the Entrprise Library, I'll be giving a free user group talk on the Enterprise Library and DAAB at the San Diego ASP.NET SIG on Tuesday, April 19th.)
I've yet to have a chance to use the Enterprise Library in a real-world project - all my current projects use the DAAB version 2.0 - but I'm itching to move to the Enterprise Library, if nothing else to have the instrumentation features built into the Enterprise Library.
On an aside, Google has moved its Google Desktop Search (GDS) out of beta. I gave GDS a trial run back in its beta days but stuck with Lookout because I wanted to be able to index source code files as well as non-AIM chat logs. The latest version of GDS includes a plugin framework and there are a gaggle of plugins available, including ones for searching text files (i.e., source code) and one for Trillian Pro (my IM client). (There are also ones for searching .chm files and OpenOffice and StarOffice files as well.) In addition to these plugins, the new GDS version also searches Firefox history, PDF docs, music files, images, and video files. Not bad. All of this plug Google's world-class ease of use and lightning fast search speeds.
What really sold me on the new GDS version was the ability to search by file extension. Say I want to look at how I implemented a custom ASP.NET server control that implemented IStateManager to extend the view state loading and saving. The following search query would fit the bill:
filetype:cs +IStateManager +LoadViewState +SaveViewState
And - bang - there are all the C# source files I was interested in. Viva la Google! :-)