WSSF v2 released: WCF contract first, contract versioning

Normally I wouldn't post just some links, but the release of the WCF web-service software factory version 2 merits an aggregation post.

Read about WSSF v2 details such as contract first supprt (WSCF), versioning guidance, etc, at Don Smith's blog; and download it from MSDN (not GotDotNet). The complete web-service versioning emerging guidance article is a must-read for anyone implementing "published" services.

Boy am I excited to check out the WSCF stuff, I just loved the WSCF tool provided by Christian Weyer/thinktecture a few years ago.

Note that the data contract wizard still assigns order attribute values incrementally, and not according to the best practices recommended by Microsoft:

"The Order property on the DataMemberAttribute should be used to make sure that all of the newly added data members appear after the existing data members. The recommended way of doing this is as follows: None of the data members in the first version of the data contract should have their Order property set. All of the data members added in version 2 of the data contract should have their Order property set to 2. All of the data members added in version 3 of the data contract should have their Order set to 3, and so on. It is okay to have more than one data member set to the same Order number."

Read Aaron Skonnard's Service Station article 'The Service Station for WCF' at MSDN for an introduction to the WCF WSSF.

Note that if you do not use VSTS, some of the new features such as the "WCF semantic code analysis" tool will not work (not even if you have VS2005 Pro + FxCop 1.35).

Getting Started with WCF (Indigo)

These days I am at a new project at a new customer after more than one year of rearchitecting and functionally porting an old VB6 solution to .NET 2.0 WinForms, and at the same time centralizing 88 client-server distributions to a single application server farm three tier distribution.

The new project is about creating an e-biz platform for providing services to partners and other systems; you know the buzz words: SOA and ESB. The solution will use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to expose and host the services implemented using .NET.

I have found these resources to be useful when getting started with WCF:

• WCF at NetFXGuide: resources, articles, blogs, etc
• Learn The ABCs Of Programming WCF
• Security in Windows Communication Foundation
• Service Contract Versioning
• Best Practices: Data Contract Versioning
• A SOA Versioning Covenant

[UPDATE] Some more useful links:

• Service Station: The Service Factory for WCF
• Versioning web-services guidance
• Fundamentals of WCF Security (6 pages)

You should also download the WCF/ASMX Service Factory toolkit and guidelines ([UPDATE] v2 des-06), these add-ins to Visual Studio is invaluable to get you started. The toolkit automates lots of the plumbing by providing wizards that generates code following the design guidelines.

Btw, I will be at the DevConnections in Vegas next week. See you there =D