Okay, we're off and running now. Earlier today I posted the first of many community drops for Service Factory v3 - don't let "build 19" fool you - this is the first one. It took us longer than expected to get this one out the door, but we're all set now.

I suspect the first question you have is "What is so specially about this release?" Fair enough question. Well, probably the biggest thing is the addition of models. This alone accounts for most of the improvements over v2. I'm not going to go into too much detail here (there will be plenty of time for that later), but here are the high points:

• Now Visual Studio has a memory about your decisions. In v2 you place your decisions in wizards. In addition to models, there are still wizards, but it's the model that "remembers" so you can generate code anytime you like.
• Now you have a visualization of the application you are building. The designers provide this. Right now there are 2 designers/models. The first screen shot below shows the one for service contracts and the one after that shows data contracts.
• Now you can delay the platform decision (WCF/ASMX/etc) and the language decision (C#/VB/etc) until as late as you like (way after you define all the service, message, and data interfaces.
• With this version there is also no assumption that you have already define the service contract before you start using the factory. You can either approach the solution from a capability perspective (dropping operations on the service contract designer) or from a data perspective (dropping data contracts on its designer).

Here is what they look like (I added the thin red boxes):

I'm trying something new during this release by including a "start here" document and a "walkthrough" document for each drop. I'm hoping this will:

• Save you lots of time in evaluating this drop.
• Set your expectations around how much time you will need to evaluate the drops.
• Provide you a very directed way to provide feedback about the drop.
• Give you an easy way to see what the new features are every 2 weeks.
• Let you know what the known issues are with each drop.
• Get me more high quality feedback so I'll know we're building the best, most appropriate Service Factory we can for you.

So please use these docments and give me your thoughts about them.

You can expect new community drop every other Friday until the end of October (unless something really unexpected happens of course).

Download Service Factory v3 Community Drop 19 here

 Looking forward to your feedback ...