This week has seen 2 new releases from Microsoft. The first one is a beta of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) with a go-live license. You can get the software and sign up for the go-live license from a page on the WinFX delveloper center. There is also an interview with Ari Bixhorn on the Microsoft Press Pass site that explains a little about what WinFX means.

If you are planning on doing any defelopment for the Microsoft platform in the long term future then it would be good to start getting familiar with the WinFX development platform. You don't need to sign the go-live license and start deploying your applications today but at some time in the future you will probably have to make the move to WinFX so it would be best to learn a little today so you can "future proof" your applications and avoid major rewrites somewhere down the line.

The second release was Enterprise Library 2.0. You can download it from MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/?url=/library/en-us/dnpag2/html/EntLib2.asp. A lot of work has gone into the Enterprise Library to make it useful and easy to use. Just remember that once you start using it, it is your code and you will have to be responsible for making sure that any bugs are fixed in your applications. I have used the application blocks in some projects and they have saved a lot of time but I have also had one bug in the configuration management application management block from several years ago that made me have to turn off caching of the configuration information in December or get errors about invalid dates. I found a fix for the problem out on the Internet and patched all my code but just this last December I found where someone else on the team didn't get the patched code and we had some problems in the first days of the month until the problem was caught and fixed. In any case the blocks have saved me a lot of time so I will definetly be looking into using them.