Just Released: Web Service Software Factory
The patterns & practices team is pleased to announce the availability of the first "official" release of the Web Service Software Factory. The Service Factory is the latest addition to our fast-growing crop of factories, including the Smart Client Software Factory and the Mobile Client Software Factory.
I know many of you have been following the evolution of our factories for a long time, so I won't bore you with too many details again - but if you are one of those people who are allergic to betas, you're now out of excuses - so I'll give a very quick spiel on what the Service Factory is about.
Like all of our factories, the Service Factory is a collection of guidance to help you build applications of a particular architectural style - in this case, service-oriented applications that expose an ASMX web service interface and provide security and business rules over a database. We have a nice graphic (which is updated from an older one you're probably already familiar with) that shows the basic architecture and scope of the Service Factory:
The factory itself is a combination of several forms of guidance:
- Written documentation, including architecture overviews, patterns and step-by-step guidance on how to build applications within the specified architecture
- Guidance packages, built using the Guidance Automation Toolkit, which automate many development tasks, including creating service contracts, translating between different entity types, generating stored procedures and creating data access logic classes
- Reference implementation, which is a made-up but realistic sample application which shows what type of services you can build with the factory.
The other very cool thing about the factory is that it is completely customizable (we ship all of the source) - so if the architecture or implementation details don't quite match what you need for your organization or project, you can just go ahead and modify the factory.
Thanks to everyone who helped deliver this project, including our fantastic project team (Jason, Don, Chris, Nelly, Sanjeev, Ed, Wojtek, Pablo, Hernan, Brian, Juan, Larry, Carlos, Tushar, Arun, Lonnie, Paul to mention but a few); our expert advisors; everyone who has participated in our community by downloading previews and providing feedback, and countless other people in and outside of Microsoft who have given their advice and support. We hope you enjoy the result!
A couple of final notes: the version of Service Factory on MSDN today only supports C#, but we are working on a VB version now and we will get this out to you as soon as possible. Also, we've already started working on the next version of Service Factory, so please keep the feedback coming to help us make the next release even better.
Comments
- Anonymous
July 29, 2006
Just in time for a project that I am in the midst of designing with another engineer is the release... - Anonymous
July 29, 2006
Good news, I'd been thinkering around with this because of my interest on software factories. I've tried the other software factories (Smart Client and Mobile) and found they're great as productivity tools but not so helpful to understand the factory concept. Web Services has a more precise scope then it's easier to shift focus and get the details of the concept. - Anonymous
July 31, 2006
So where exactly is the Coho Winery hands-on lab that I see mentioned on MSDN? I've been looking around, but can't seem to find anything related to this. Thanks. - Anonymous
July 31, 2006
Don's hard at work on the hands-on-lab, and he hopes to have it available on the community site within a week. - Anonymous
August 01, 2006
Thank you very much. - Anonymous
August 02, 2006
Another one of the patterns & practices teams has released the guidance and software they have been... - Anonymous
August 03, 2006
My previous post discussed some of the problem domain I am facing with implementing autonomous services... - Anonymous
August 08, 2006
A few releases ago the factory also supported WCF, any news on when this will be the case again? - Anonymous
August 08, 2006
Hi Todd -
As you noticed, we actually started the Service Factory work by building a WCF guidance package, and we released some CTP builds that included this. However since WCF is still unreleased and evolving, we decided that it made sense for the first release to target ASMX only, so we temporarily stopped development on WCF. Now that v1 is released, we've started work on WCF again - you'll start seeing updated preview builds on the community workspace soon, and the official v2 release of the Service Factory will include WCF guidance packages.
Tom - Anonymous
August 09, 2006
Hey everyone. Sorry for the delay on the hands-on labs. I've just posted them to the community workspace at http://practices.gotdotnet.com/svcfactory. Thank for your patience.