Contract First Development Tool

A beta release of the Web Services Contract First tool is available on CodePlex. This is a Visual Studio 2008 add-in targetting WCF made by the same group in the web services community that did a tool of the same name for ASMX (to tell the two apart, the WCF version is called WSCF Blue while the ASMX version is now called WSCF Classic).

The basic idea of contract first development is the same though, which is to start work from the description or specification of the service, such as WSDL or XSD, rather than a service contract captured in code. If you’re developing integration with an existing service then you’re probably doing at least some contract first development. If you’re building new services then you might or might not be familiar with the style. The tooling then provides features in support of contract first development, such as stub and code generation and wizards to work with contract descriptions without having to know all of the intricacies of the specification languages.