While reading another wonderful piece from Scott Hanselman, it just came to me in a sudden – I it possible, that we still haven't arrived to the age of enterprise templates? What are (or better, were) enterprise templates?

As time evolves, patterns and frameworks also do evolve significantly. Some APIs, features tend to become less useful, less 'modern'. If you happen to work at an enterprise, these might be even put to an official list to avoid, even companies implement tools that either at checkin time or later on, automatically; or manually, using crucible or similar tool do hunt down these anti-APIs. Isn't there an easier way? More than a decade ago I've chosen the following as the title of my thesis: Enterprise Templates and Domain Specific Languages – Enabling Modification of Visual Studio.NET IDEs to Comply with Company Standards and to Enhance Developer Productivity (yes, title brevity wasn't an aim). So, what this was about? Visual Studio (and also Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc) easily allows creation of addons/plugins. One type of these addins is the ability to create a DSL – Domain Specific Language. In my thesis I showed a way with actual implementation on using DSL to recreate the normal development environment, language, base class libraries, etc. – minus those particular features you want to get rid of. You want to introduce a warning if someone uses UrlPathEncode? You want to get rid of the property EnableViewStateMac and default it to be true? All of these is easily possible with enterprise templates.

Why it did not got into the common knowledge? That's a rather good question. Have YOU ever heard of enterprise templates and the possibilities described above?