Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition

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The Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of resources designed to help our customers quickly and consistently build WCF and ASMX Web services that adhere to well-known architecture and design patterns. These resources consist of models with code generation in the form of tools integrated with Visual Studio and patterns and architecture topics in the form of written guidance.
The Service Factory contains automation and guidance integrated into Visual Studio 2005 for building services. The core of the automation components is a Web services domain model. This domain model contains elements such as service contracts, operations, messages, and data contracts. This domain model manifests itself in the form of three integrated domain-specific languages (DSLs) that are used to model services: Service Contract Model, Data Contract Model, and the Host Model. The Service Contract Model is illustrated in the following screenshot.

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To learn more about the Service Factory, please visit the community site at https://codeplex.com/servicefactory.

Roadmap

Because this release of the Service Factory is only targeting users of Visual Studio 2005, the first order of business now is to provide early adopters of Visual Studio 2008 with a compatible release. The team is currently finalizing the plan for this release and the first preview release will be available shortly after the new year. The final release will be available before the end of February 2008.

Visual Studio Team System codename “Rosario” will include some software factory platform capabilities and we are working closely with that team to provide a version of the Service Factory in the Rosario preview releases to highlight these new platform additions. You can see the first example of this in the Rosario November CTP and we will continue to provide these previews in future Rosario CTPs and betas.

Independent of the Service Factory, there are a couple of projects beginning in the coming months. One will provide guidance about using WF and Workflow Services, and another project will be updating the Application Architecture Guide originally released in 2003.

While the Service Factory provides our customers guidance and capabilities for building services today, in the future these capabilities will naturally be replaced by Oslo. Fortunately, it will be much easier to help many of our customers get to Oslo since we know they will be using the Service Factory and not tools they have built themselves. In addition to helping our customers make the move to Oslo, we are also looking forward to sharing our experiences and customer feedback with the Oslo team over the coming year.