Apparently MS will be providing a factory for creating your own application blocks for v3.0 of the Enterprise Library , should you desire to do so. Reading Ayende's latest post on this and his link to this flashback post from Joel Spolsky, had me rolling on the floor laughing.
Now I know MS has worked very hard on the Enterprise Library the past couple years, and from what I've seen it's quite comprehensive. But I also think that's a weakness. Because my experience with these kind of frameworks is that they try to solve every problem known to man in one package. And the fact that each of the application blocks "complement" one another pretty much means you'll have to use a handful of them together for it to be effective, even though it might not be the best solution for that particular problem.
Meanwhile, there are perfectly good OSS options available that are just really good at one particular thing. Take for example, log4net. It's such a simple, lightweight and easy-to-use logging, dare i say, "framework". But that's the thing. It's one mini-framework instead of a framework of frameworks. I could go on and on about all of the OSS tools that are making my life easier as a developer.
Another example is the Spring.NET framework. Now yes, Spring.NET does offer solutions to a number of different problems, similar to the Enterprise Library. But I've pretty much used Spring.NET exclusively for my dependency injection needs for a while now. And the funny thing is that for the longest time, I thought that's all it did. Now that is a sign of an easy-to-use framework. Sure it offers features for AOP, web development, remoting and transaction management. None of which I've used yet. But I love the fact that it's not in my face about it.
Ok, so to make this post somewhat productive, here's a list off the top of my head of the OSS tools that are making my life easier these days:
I'm sure I forgot a few, but these are examples of tools that I'm finding solve their particular problem very well.