The Microsoft patterns & practices team has just released a new version of the Web Client Software Factory (WCSF).

The Web Client Software Factory (WCSF) provides a set of guidance for architects and developers building enterprise Web applications, with includes samples, reusable code and a guidance package to automate tasks in Visual Studio. There is also support for ASP.NET Ajax.

New In This Release

The February 2008 release of the Web Client Software Factory has the following improvements to the June 2007 release.

• Full support for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5
• Added ASP.NET AJAX extenders for Context Sensitive Autocomplete, AJAX Validation, and Real Time Search that can be used in existing ASP.NET sites and ASP.NET sites built using the Composite Web Application Block.
• Added UI Composition capability through extending our dependency injection mechanism to support Pages, User Controls and Master Pages.
• Added Dependency Injection on ASMX Web Services and JSON services.
• Added a new set of Quickstarts and How-To topics on MVP, Modularity and the new AJAX extenders
• Added a new Order Entry Reference application that demonstrates all of the new functionality.

In addition, this release of WCSF has the following community issues and fixes:

• 42 Workitems closed including the top-voted items on CodePlex
• Add ASP.NET AJAX Support (97 votes)
• Web Client Software Factory Support for Enterprise Library 3.1 (62 votes)
• Services through configuration (32 votes)
• Support for using the Validation Application Block (16 votes)
• Recipe support for Visual Basic .NET (20 votes)
• Added Presenter support for Master Pages (11 votes)

There is also a community site available: http://www/codeplex.com/websf