Visual design tools come to Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition

You can now construct your web services using visual tools. The Web Service Software Factory: Modeling Edition (also known as the Service Factory) is an integrated collection of resources designed to help you quickly and consistently build Windows Communications Foundation (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 community technology preview (CTP) for early adopters of Visual Studio 2008 should be available early in the new calendar year.

You can learn more about Service Factory on MSDN. The Service Factory download includes documentation and source code and is now available on codeplex.com.