Tom Hollander talks here about how the work of the Enterprise Library (and the whole Patterns and Practices initiative) is going regarding a new version for .NET 2.0 (thanks to Sam for pointing to it!).
I think Tom makes a lot of good points and really puts the whole effort into a clear context, particularly regarding what the real goals are.
I'm personally starting to use the Enterprise Library in a few projects (and several other projects in the company use it), with good results. New projects are starting to come together where VS 2005 might be the tool of choice, so I'm looking forward to what the new version will bring.
Looking at this from another perspective, though, I'm not sure I totally agree with the position Tom presents regarding the direction Enterprise Library might take. I totally agree that we should have an Enterprise Library release that is very .NET 2.0-oriented and really represents best practices. However, I'm not sure that completely holding off the next release until that point in time is completely practical. The reason I believe this is that, realisticly, getting an actual release that represents best practices will just take as long as the first release took, which is to say, it really shouldn't happen until .NET 2.0 itself has been somewhat widely deployed and real projects have been done with it out there in the field (at least that's my opinion).
So, I believe there is a place for an intermediate release that can provide some support for the early projects and work up from there. Or, maybe a rolling release where the base modules of the library can be stabilized and released earlier, I don't know...
Of course, this is a totally egotistical POV for me, since I'm the one that will have to do the projects I'd much rather have something to start building on than nothing :)
