Just Released: Web Service Software Factory

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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.