One more thing on the application blocks. When I say that they aren't the most sophisticated things in the world, and then I read it in full pixelated glory, I realized that it sounded more negative than I had intended. Maybe it wasn't the best choice of words.
Take this dictionary entry for sophisticate, for instance. Could mean less naive, could mean more complex, could mean impure! Heh. Your assignment, if you choose to accept it, is to download them and figure out which definitions apply.
Regardless, I wanted to correct myself [before anyone actually started reading my blog that loves the application blocks] by saying that I have seen/built frameworks in the past that address the concerns addressed by most of the application blocks, and some of them have been amazingly coherent and beautiful, and some of them have not. The MS app blocks are in the sweet spot of being useful for most applications. They have the additional benefit of being open-source, which is itself a double-edged sword. You can fix any bugs you find, and you can customize at will, but in doing so, you might run the risk of creating a maintenance headache. One of the blocks is community supported, the data access block.
Ron Jacobs, a member of the patterns and practices team, is the product manager for the application blocks. He is also the product manager for Shadowfax. Shadowfax is a reference architecture for service-oriented applications. It is currently in "closed" beta [they were nice enough to let me in the group without having a clue who I am, so they don't seem all that picky about membership], and they have one of those all-inclusive, ultra-restrictive NDAs that you have to agree to to access the code.
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