Chapter 2. The Configuration Application Block Design-Time

A COMMON COMPLAINT ABOUT the application blocks before Enterprise Library was that configuration was often a challenging, tedious, and error-prone activity. The Enterprise Library team worked hard to design and develop design-time features and tools to address this issue. These features are intended to not only make the exercise of configuring an application straightforward and simple, but to also provide extensibility points to let you add your own design-time features if you need to.

This chapter first highlights how to use the Enterprise Library Configuration Tool to take advantage of the features provided by the Configuration Application Block's runtime. Specifically, it describes how to use the tool to create and modify configuration sections, configure StorageProviders and Transformers, and enable encryption of the configuration data in configuration sections. It continues with an in-depth examination of the Configuration Application Block's design-time features and design. It concludes with an example of how to extend Enterprise Library's design-time features by adding design-time support for the DatabaseStorageProvider that was created inChapter 1.