It provides APIs to facilitate proven practices in core areas of programming including data access, logging, exception handling and others.
Enterprise Library is provided as pluggable binaries and source code, which can be freely used and customized by developers for their own purposes.
Each application block addresses a specific cross-cutting concern and provides highly configurable features, which results in higher developer productivity.
In this case, the patterns & practices team uses the graceful retirement process to deprecate some parts.
Starting November 2013, Microsoft fully open-sourced Enterprise Library and all of its application blocks.
In August 2015, Microsoft posted they were handing Unity Dependency Injection over to new owners (Pablo Cibraro and Pedro Wood) into a new GitHub repo.
[3] At the same time, the patterns & practices - Enterprise Library home web site on CodePlex,[17] announced that the remainder of the application blocks will no longer be developed.