Operation inference and Contract-first Design

After Tomas's comment on my last blog, I've been thinking about the operation inference feature in Christian's WSCF tool.

I'm not sure that inferring operations based on the message name has been standardized. (Please correct me if I'm wrong) I've, nevertheless, noticed that several companies such as eBay name their messages in a standard manner similar to that used to infer operations by the WSCF tool.

My thoughts were that to do this right we would need to enable a wizard, similar to the "Text Import Wizard" in Excel, to import messages and create a contract. That way, a user could specify how to infer the operations based on message attributes and not be forced to name his messages in a particular manner.

Either way, I'm not sure that operation inference is a high priority. If we give users a manner to manually select the messages types/data types for a particular operation, we have made a huge leap. Automating the operation creation is simply a lower priority.

While this feature may be somewhat important to true message-first design, as users will claim that they should not have to think about operations, I'm not convinced that forcing users to name messages in a manner so that operation can be inferred is really that useful, unless, they were going to name their messages in that manner anyways.

Comments?

Thanks,

Ali