Book excerpt: This book introduces one of the most exciting and popular .NET-oriented initiatives; the Enterprise Application Library, which offers nine classes of reusable code used to solve a variety of common problem spaces. It is the first book to introduce all ten of the enterprise application blocks, which have been recently updated for .NET 2.0. It covers a number of topics, including configuration, data access, exception management, caching, application updates, UI separation, asynchronous invocation, logging, security, and XML-based information aggregation. With this book readers will be able to build .NET applications faster and more efficiently.