Where is The Application Block Software Factory?
Where is The Application Block Software Factory?
As someone who uses 
Enterprise Library for many
cases, I recently searched
for the Application Block
Software Factory in the
release of ent-lib 4.0 and didn’t find it.
As a result, I went to the internet to search it and found Grigori Melnik’s
post that indicates that “two pieces were removed from the release:
Application Block Software Factory and Strong-Naming Guidance Package”
In the release of ent-lib 4.0 the Application Block Software Factory and
Strong-Naming Guidance Package were removed and were inserted to the
EntLibContrib. Going to the following link and downloading the last release of
EntLibContrib raised another problem.
I tried to run the setup of Application Block Software Factory and got errors.
Apparently, the Application Block Software Factory misses a strong name key -
25StrongName.snk and therefore it isn’t working. The work around for the problem
is to remove the snk or to generate it by myself. I chose the easy way – the first solution.
Application Block Software Factory comes with all it sources so I opened its solution.
In order to remove the snk I went to the Properties menu of the projects that have
signing with snk and in the Signing tab I unchecked the “Sign the assembly” checkbox.
After compiling the solution and then rebuilding the BlockFactorySetup project a setup
project that I could run was generated.
Before running the setup don’t forget to install GAX (Guidance Automation Extensions)
or else the installation won’t work.