The patterns & practices team is working on a kick ass guidance around designing and developing Web services.

Fist public result is this:

More details on this.

The guys @Thinktecture have released WSCF 0.51 which fixes many bugs.

And.... if you want to discuss WSCF: They have launched http://forums.thinktecture.com/

Nach einigen Verzögerungen ist WSCF 0.5 seit gestern zum Download verfügbar.

Neue Features in WSCF 0.5:

Enhanced Code Generation

• Data type generation: WSCF now optionally strips out generated data classes and puts them in their own file.
• Interfaces: WSCF now generates a .NET interface instead of an abstract class. This is extremely helpful if you want to separately host the service interface and the service implementation. E.g. if you want to host the service implementation under Enterprise Services (ES) and expose a service interface for ES, one for WSE messaging and one for ASMX. In this case you have to define a shared interface that follows the same contract as the WSDL file.
• Enhanced properties: WSCF now checks for null references when it generates properties for private fields.
• Constructors: WSCF now generates some default ctor code with all necessary parameters for data classes.
• Collections: WSCF now validates input parameters (i.e. for nullity) for Add, IndexOf, Insert, Remove, and Contains methods
• Naming guidelines: WSCF uses Pascal casing for generated type names, even if XSD types use Camel casing  (applies to Document/literal[bare] WSDLs only)
• Misc:
1. Generated Web Service methods throw NotImplementedException by default.
2. XML documentation in /description/schema/.../element/annotation/documentation will be persisted in <summary> XML docs in code for generated type.
• Web Service help & doc page:
1. WSCF now provides a Web service help page that the user can use when going to the .asmx endpoint with his browser. In 0.4 code generation just disabled this ‘documentation’ feature.
2. The documentation page provides the same test and documentation features as the original one; but it disallows calling ?wsdl on the endpoint.
• WSCF now optionally generates a <service> element into the WSDL. This is for interop reasons, primarily.

WSDL Wizard and Generation Improvements

• WSDL round-tripping: load wizard from an existing WSDL and being able to add and remove operations et. al.
• Message headers: an indefinite number of header elements per message is now possible, not just one.
• Schemas: including other additional schemas than the one initially selected to start from is now implemented.
• Operation inference: automatically infers operation names from message type names based on string patterns.

[via Christian Weyer]

Bisher habe ich das Thema Contract-First komplett außer Acht gelassen. Dies wird sich Dank des Aritkels "Am Anfang war der Vertrag: Contract First Design und Microkernel-Frameworks" von Ralf Westphal in der aktuellen Ausgabe der DotNetPro nun ändern - nicht zuletzt weil sich damit einige Fragen, die ich mir in den letzten Tagen gestellt habe (Stichwort: Zirkuläre Abhängigkeiten in Visual Studio) in Wohlgefallen auflösen werden.