After thinktecture StarterSTS has hit the 5,000 downloads mark a few weeks ago (congrats again, Dom!), we now have hit 10,000 for our WCF-based Web Services contract-first tool WSCF.blue.
Was suprised at the lack of contract-first (from WSDL) support in WCF, but your tool came to the rescue. It allowed me to generate WCF proxies from a Java web service, getting all the attribute markup on the proxy correct first time. This saved me hours and hours of laborious manual trial-and-error. Thank you - a highly recommended tool
For the how we focus on WCF, the built-in support in Visual Studio and
the command tools. Then move on to show some basic first steps to do schema-based contract-first with WSCF.blue.
Enjoy.
It has been a long time where I originally built the Web Services Contract First tool... I am getting old. This tool - briefly called WSCF - (available both as a command line utility and a simple Visual Studio add-in) was targeted at the ASMX platform. WSCF evolved until version 0.7 which still works on ASMX and within Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. ... and then there was silence... a long period of silence... a too long period of silence... and I still feel sorry about this. People were longing for schema-based contract first tool support for the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) - and I couldn't do it due to a lot of work in customer projects.
Fast forward to 2009: I am a happy guy because I found a set of intelligent and super motivated coding heroes who now have now released the Beta 1 version of WSCF.blue: The WSCF tool for WCF. These heroes are namely:
WSCF.blue is hosted over at CodePlex. Please go and grab it, test it and... please provide any feedback you have! Thanks for being patient. The wait is over now.
Agreed: there has never been a really good relationship - let's not even start talking about friendship - between Germans and Brits. Let's forget about this for a while... working together with an industry luminary like Richard Blewett is more than I could ever wish.
Luckily enough, Richard joined thinktecture this week as a high-class consultant - welcome! Working with Rich (subscribe to his blog here) is surely going to be a lot of fun.
I know that so many people waited for this - now it is for real: get our famous, most-wanted and original WSCF 0.7 (we call it WSCF.classic nowadays when compared to WSCF.blue, the WSCF tooling for WCF) in source code form CodePlex and improve it.
We decided to open up the development and the code of our very successful WSCF tool - but not the original one for ASMX-based Web Services, but rather the new incarnation for WCF. Unfortunately, neither of us has enough time these days to spend on a free tool like this. Therefore we invite the community and everybody interested to participate in WSCF.blue development over at its new CodePlex home.
Currently, there are three people trying to contribute to WSCF.blue: -Edward Bakker (the designated project leader) -Buddhike de Silva (coding wizard and hacker of almost 80% of WSCF 0.7) -Benjamin Santosh
I can imagine that WSCF.blue will evolve into a very useful tool with all these fantastic people working on it.
Please note that we also no longer support the WSCF forums - just for the same reasons. Sorry :(
Please take a look at what Ganesh has to say about the principle of the "Viewpoint Flip" and how it enables you to better approach the design of services (let's not use 'SOA' too much in this context...): crisp and all-there-is-to-say. My opinion in the past few years always has been that object-oriented thinking is way misleading, to say the least, when trying to grok services: we needs to switch our viewpoint, our thinking to be *service-oriented* (take that literal). BTW: an approach like this and tooling made explicitly for this approachmay help you with flipping your viewpoint.
Now with VS2008 being released obviously a lot of people also want to run WSCF in it. I have an updated WSCF.addin file which you need to replace the original one with (the location of the .addin file depends on your install option).
Please note that this has not been broadly tested but customers have reported successful execution of WSCF inside VS2008.
Some heads up wrt to WSCF - this is what I just posted over at the thinktecture forums (which have been quiet from our side for a loooong time, sorry).
Hello everybody,
first of all I really need to apologize the long silence in these forums here - sorry!
To make a (quite) long story short: We will open source WSCF.blue (the version we are currently building for WCF) by the beginning of 2008.
WSCF has always been a toy project for us - and as we are very busy in 'real' projects we could not work much on it, sorry again.
The questions still open in this forum will likely not be addressed and answered as we are trying to figure out how to host the source code for WSCF (e.g. on Codeplex).
Please watch my blog at http://blogs.thinktecture.com/cweyer/ to get notified when we are done with WSCF.blue.
Thanks again for using WSCF and providing incredibly useful feedback over the years!
Regards, Christian Weyer
So, some more to come - but I am now mentally ready to give this baby away...
