Software Factory refresh for VS 2008
About a year ago I blogged about Software Factories and the great response from people who were using them.
Software Factories have continued to be a useful resource for the community and we are invested on updating them based on your feedback. A few weeks ago we released a refresh of one of these kits to target Visual Studio 2008.
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 Web services that adhere to well-known architecture and design patterns. This collection of resources includes patterns and architecture topics in the form of written guidance and models with code generation in the form of tools integrated with Visual Studio 2008.
This update addresses specific feedback from the original release:
- The tooling should remember the information provided so it does not have to be provided each time the source code is generated.
- The next version should focus less on the data access and business logic tiers and more on the service interface.
- Help those who want to modify the Service Factory source code; doing this is not a straightforward process.
- Wizards are okay some of the time, but a visualization of the services is a better experience.
- Services should be designed in a technology-independent manner.
To learn more about the Service Factory, please visit its official home on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/servicefactory. I encourage you to also visit the community site at http://www.codeplex.com/servicefactory. The community site contains hands-on labs for both using and extending the Service Factory, discussions with customers and field, known issues, and roadmap information.
Namaste!
