In December 2006 Microsoft released a new version of Web Service Software Factory. The new version had support for WCF and also some security guidance and custom Code Analysis rules.

For us, this release was perfect timing, since we started to help a customer with a very ambitious SOA initiative. For once we have been able to help the customer with business architecture and we now base the SOA on this architecture (as it should be). In January we began the first iteration and the first services will be deployed and used by the business in the end of April. Developers started to join in the end of January and from that on we began to do weekly deliveries.

Now back to WSSF. Since we were going to create several services from start, and having developers from different consulting firms involved, we felt that WSSF would help us get a consistent design of all the services, and also to improve our productivity. With only two more weeks to go until we stop creating any new code for the first delivery, I can say that we are satisfied with the result. All services follow the same patterns and the productivity have been great. WSSF has also shorten the learning curve of WCF for the developers, none had used WCF before, but all was productive from day one and are learning WCF as we go forward.

We haven't been using the data access parts of the factory for a couple of different reasons. One of the reasons was that we found the pattern a little bit complex and we also did not wanted to bring too much new stuff to the table for the developers.

If you haven't tried WSSF yet, I can recommend you to download it and start labing with it. I will probably blog a little bit about how you can customize the factory to fit your needs better. We have done this, and I believe that most will do it to get the most out of the factory.