When the providers installed with Enterprise Library don't meet your needs, take advantage of the library's pluggable architecture and roll your own.
by Alex Homer
November 13, 2006
ne of the most useful features of the Microsoft Enterprise Library is its adaptability; all the application blocks are fully extensible. Like ASP.NET itself, Enterprise Library implements a pluggable architecture that lets you replace parts of the code with your own implementations or extend the application blocks by creating your own providers. Figure 1 shows a schematic view of how the application blocks rely on services exposed by the Enterprise Library core (such as configuration, instrumentation, and object creation services). In addition, each block uses one or more pluggable providers to connect to the resources or data it uses or processes.
About The Caching Application Block
As an example of this architecture within an application block, Figure 2 shows how the Caching Application Block uses a series of separate classes to cache and expose data. The core operations of the block take place through a Cache Manager, which exposes the public methods available to client applications. Cached data resides in an in-memory cache, providing best performance when reading and storing data. At the same time, all changes to the cached data are passed to a backing store provider, which persists the data onto a more permanent medium.
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ne of the most useful features of the Microsoft Enterprise Library is its adaptability; all the application blocks are fully extensible. Like ASP.NET itself, Enterprise Library implements a pluggable architecture that lets you replace parts of the code with your own implementations or extend the application blocks by creating your own providers. 
